[A bearded figure in a corduroy suitcoat assumes the podium. He fiddles with the microphone for an inordinately long amount of time, then turns the thing over in his hands and contemplates it with much wonder, as though he is a time traveler from the 19th Century. You figure this foppish boob is some sort of invalid handyman, an acid casualty turned Peace Corps janitor. You wait for him to get off the stage. Then he produces a crumpled wad of receipts from his pocket, flattens them out upon the podium and violently clears his throat. He begins to speak. Horrified, you realize that this is a second-year volunteer, and that he is speaking to you.]
Welcome, Peace Corps Freshmen. It is June the 20th. One week to go. By now, your mom has finished packing your underwear. You have quit your temp job, broken off your most recent long-term romantic relationship, and have finally abandoned all hope for your last-ditch grad school application to Vanderbilt. [Here, the speaker chuckles to himself but receives no laughter in return. He takes a long swig from a Nalgene bottle containing a murky brown fluid and coughs.]
Yes, these are anxious times. I remember them well. The Peace Corps seemed like a grand idea about a year ago, when you were unemployed and sleeping well into the afternoon upon an inflatable mattress in the utility room of your ex-girlfriend's studio apartment. And it remained a grand idea up until two months ago, when your selfless dedication to service made you an instant celebrity at the local watering hole, where old timers would slap you across the back and say, wistfully, drunkenly, Y'know, I wish I had ... y'know ... when I was your age ...
But now that the idea is inching ever closer to becoming reality, it is starting to feel like a terrible mistake. What if Vanderbilt has a sudden change of heart? What if Shirley Hawksby is the love of your life and you just don't know it yet? And then, more existentially: why, of all places, China? Of all the things I could be doing with the next two years of my ever-vanishing youth, why should I spend them teaching college English in Sichuan Province? Two years is a long time, you figure, and couldn't I just stay home and make a difference here in Sandpoint, Idaho? And meanwhile, there's Shirley Hawksby to consider. And her double-D gazongas to consider ... Maybe you should call the Peace Corps and tender your resignation. But no: this is the US Government you're dealing with, here. So you contemplate faking your own death, and you wonder whether Shirley Hawksby would run away with you if you both agreed to adopt suitably sexy-sounding aliases.
In all likelihood, Shirley Hawksby and these last-minute anxieties of yours will wind up losing out to your sense of adventure. One way or another, you will board that flight to San Francisco, and in a hungover daze, you will sit through a litany of getting-to-know-you icebreaker sessions. Then, along with however many of you there are, you will make the great leap across the Pacific to the People's Republic of China. I could, of course, tell you what is likely to happen after that, but I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.
The question that brought you this far is the same question that plagues all Peace Corps volunteers: is what I am doing right now worthwhile? There is no easy answer to that question. It is a hypothetical question in a way, because it implies that you could be elsewhere doing elsewise. The question opens up an abyss of where-should-I-be's? and where-might-I-be's? The ability to ask hypothetical questions is the greatest curse humanity has ever been blessed with. We have the capacity to dream up an infinity of universes, reasonable universes and totally fantastical ones - universes in which we fake our own death and run off with Shirley Hawksby, universes in which we bring the literary world to its literary knees, universes in which we remain in Sandpoint, Idaho for the rest of our lives doing god-knows-what - and out of those millions of universes, we must in the end choose only one. Almost one year ago to the day, I chose the universe in which I would spend two years teaching college English in China. So the question I suppose you might have for me is this: do you feel like what you are doing right now is worthwhile?
Here, I could let my eyes glaze over. I could run off at the mouth about all the wonderful things the Peace Corps is doing in China. But that would be disingenuous of me. Of course, the Peace Corps is doing wonderful things in China and all over the world. I no longer question their motives. But I do question my own motives. Is what I am doing right now worthwhile? The question is there waiting for me in my morning Nalgene bottle of Nescafe, and haunts me even after who knows how many nightcaps.
Peace Corps China is different from most other Peace Corps programs. You will be fairly comfortable in China. No huts. No hovels. You will have an apartment. You will probably have a DVD player in your living room, if not a computer. At first, you might be disappointed that you're not roughing it like Peace Corps Uganda, but before long, you will find yourself griping about how glitchy the DVD player is, or how slow the internet is, and so on.
You will not be dropped via helicopter into The Shit. Nor will you find yourself in an idyllic Chinese village. The Shit, as far as Peace Corps China goes, is a relatively poor metropolis. In all likelihood, you will be placed in a very large city where your only regular contacts are shish-kebab vendors and taxi drivers. It is unlikely that you will save any lives during your two years of service. You won't be digging irrigation ditches or treating AIDS patients. You will work a regular old J-O-B during the afternoon, and when the working day is done, during that time of day in which girls merely want to have fun, you will be left to your own devices. So you will attempt to bond with China during that time. But try as you might, you will find it immensely difficult to make a single Chinese friend among any of the 1.3 billion people that surround you. Alas, despite your best efforts, you will remain a foreigner in this country, and for that reason, you will be both embraced by the locals and kept at arm's length from them.
It will be hard for you to see how much of a difference you are making. A full calendar year has passed, and I have absolutely no idea as to what kind of impact my existence is having on Nanchong or its millions of inhabitants. At least in a Ugandan village, you might be able to cite specific instances of having helped so-and-so, or of having done such-and-such. Here, the fruits of your good deeds are not so evident. After one year in China, the people in your neighborhood will continue to heckle and taunt you as though you're fresh off the boat. You will go entire semesters wondering whether you have taught anyone a single damned thing. You will bust your ass for four months trying to teach your students that America is a diverse place, with black people, white people, Latinos - even Chinese people! And when the final exam rolls around, every last one of them will tell you that Americans are white people with big noses and lots of hair. Welcome to China. It's very Chinese here. And it's been that way for 5,000 years. Just how does one go about changing a Chinese city the size of Denver? Beats you. Beats me.
Do I feel that what I am doing is worthwhile? Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Yes. I think so. I just got back from Chongqing [hooting in the back row from the Chongqing contingent] and I was struck by the fact that on the bus ride home from what might be the largest city in the world, none of my fellow travelers seemed to have ever seen a foreigner before. They couldn't help but stare. Everything I did was exotic. He's reading - in English! He's sending a text message - in English! He's passed out and is drooling on my husband's shoulder - in English!
I grew up in Nebraska, a state as homogenized as the milk it produces, but Nebraska is Spanish Harlem compared to Sichuan. In Sichuan, the mere presence of a foreigner is enough to trigger moped accidents, stock market crashes and mass hysteria. So as a volunteer, you are endowed with a kind of superpower, the superpower of constant visibility. And you must decide at some point whether you will use that power for good or for evil. For two years, you will be the center of attention, wherever you go, whatever you do. Not a booger will go unpicked without comment. It is irritating, to say the least. But will you remain pleasant? Will you continue to make public appearances? Will you take the heckling with a grain of MSG? These are silly questions if you are living in America, or serving in Uganda. But they are not so silly to me. These are the questions that haunt me. It is difficult to remain pleasant. It is difficult to leave the apartment. But it is my job, a job before which my J-O-B is insignificant. Because the strangers who bother me on the street tell me about the foreigner they met six years ago. He was fat, they'll say. Or she was mean, they'll say. He couldn't speak Chinese, they'll say. They remember everything about the last foreigner they met. A city the size of Denver, and they remember one foreigner. And I am that foreigner for thousands of people I won't remember after I leave.
I will not save any lives in China. I will not dig any ditches. But this is the most powerful country on earth and its inhabitants know next to nothing about the outside world. So, simply by existing, I am informing them. By walking to the corner store to buy toilet paper, I am educating them. By successfully eating a bowl of ramen with chopsticks, I am astounding them. So is what I am doing right now worthwhile? Yes. I think so, yes.
[Here, the bearded figure in the corduroy suitcoat grows nervous, unplugs the microphone and, before your very eyes, eats it. Disgusted to the point of becoming violently ill, you watch the microphone sink down into his esophagus. He belches and takes a bow. There is a smattering of applause from the back row. In one week, you will arrive in San Francisco. There will be icebreakers.]
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
High Loon
And so my second semester in China ends as suddenly and chaotically as it began. This morning, I noticed a 48th student sitting all by her lonesome in the back row of the auditorium. After a series of idiotic squints, I managed to make out the blunt features of my blunt-spoken supervisor. I broke into a sweat. My knees buckled and trembled. I assumed, as I always do when confronted by an authority figure, that I was in deep shit. I mentally packed my bags, visualized the concourse of the Chengdu International Airport, and ran through my resignation speech as I switched on the projector screen and cued up The Joy Luck Club. Then, I sat in the very front row for about fifteen seconds before my supervisor snuck up from behind and swatted me on the shoulder.
"Come to the rear, please?"
"Oh, right, sure, no problem, okay!" I stammered.
"I have three things to tell," she said.
I could see where this was going already. Number one: a vague compliment. Number two: a schedule change, an upcoming Chinese holiday, a 93-year-old handyman coming to my apartment at such-and-such o'clock. It was number three that I was afraid of. Actually, I couldn't see where this was going at all.
"Number one," she said. "The final exam is start next week."
I painted over my astonishment with a dopey grin and a string of rapid-fire nods.
"Oh, that's cool. Like, next Monday?"
"That is number two," she said. "Next Wednesday you know is Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Monday and Tuesday there is no class. No class Monday and Tuesday. We will have class Saturday and Sunday in lieu."
In lieu? In the loo? I nodded, nodded, nodded.
"So we have a vacation? But not really?"
"Yes," she said, "vacation, but not really. So the final exam is begin on Saturday."
"The day after tomorrow. Excellent," I said, "and what's behind door number three?"
"Oh. Number three is, do you like singing a song?"
"Sometimes," I said, listing in my mind the conditions under which I have been known to sing publicly.
"I will go to KTV tomorrow loon," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Tomorrow loon I will go to KTV."
"... sorry?"
"KTV tomorrow loon."
The Sichuanese possess two of the world's more puzzling speech impediments. Surprisingly, the L/R dichotomy is a non-issue in Sichuan. My students can pronounce the word "ruler" without spraining their tongues, and the kids on the street certainly have no problem with "HELLO!" But in my leck of the woods, otherwise fluent speakers of Mandarin cannot seem to distinguish L from N. So the city in which I live is interchangeably called "Nanchong" or "Lanchong." Not even l/native N/Lanchongers can make up their minds on the issue. H and F are another trouble spot. My beard is either a fuzi or a huzi, depending on how rustic the barber is. And the Mandarin word for mediocre, mama huhu, already perhaps the best word in any language, is unquestionably improved by the Sichuanese pronunciation: mama fufu.
"Loon! Loon!" said my supervisor with mounting exasperation. Then, finally: "Noon!"
So my supervisor was proposing a karaoke date for tomorrow noon. I thought again of the conditions necessary for me to risk singing in public, and certainly stone sober at high noon with my supervisor in a simultaneously glitzy and dumpy karaoke room did not meet my crooning criteria. I nodded, nodded, nodded, and before I could weasel my way out of the appointment, found myself agreeing to meet her the next day at loon. Noon!
I've watched the first half of The Joy Luck Club exactly six times by now. I didn't have time to screen the movie before I showed it to my first batch of kids, just fired up the DVD player and let it fly, trusting that the R rating was on account of adult language and similarly adult themes, not full-frontal nudity or graphic sex scenes or realistic depictions of human dismemberment. A high school history teacher of mine used to quote a phrase, one that he seemed to believe he'd coined himself: when you ASSUME, you make an ass out of U and ME. ASS, U, ME. Assume. I'm not sure why he directed this at us, or at me in particular. Perhaps I assumed more than your average high school freshman. But this time I assumed correctly, making an ASS out of neither U nor ME. The Joy Luck Club wasn't raunchy at all. I was relieved: a wholesome family film about Chinese mothers and their daughters, Rated M for Mahjongg. But what I hadn't considered beforehand was precisely the one thing that should've been foremost in my mind in the first place: namely, whether the film contained any questionable, er, um, content.
So about fifteen minutes in, just as I was beginning to doodle flying dinosaurs in the margins of my notebook, I heard something that jolted me bolt upright in my seat and sent my blood pressure shooting up into the red, way up into the Limbaugh Zone.
"That's when I remembered what we could never talk about," said the narrator. "My mother had once told me this strange story about what happened to her in China."
A crowd of displaced Chinese men and women appeared on screen, hobbling forlornly up a gravel road. Burning buildings in the background. Screaming children. Jesus. I felt like screaming, myself. Instead, I sat perfectly still and sweated all over my flying dinosaurs and wondered whether Spherion Temp Services would take me back. Stupid, Mr. Panda. Really stupid. Now you've done it. Now you've made an ass out of U, ME, and - well, just U and ME, it looks like. But U'll be lucky if U and ME even have an ASS left after THEY are done with U. I rose slightly from my chair. I would walk right across the room and skip the movie ahead ten minutes. That's what I would do. A problem with the DVD, I would chuckle. But that was too obvious. So I stalled there for a moment, halfway in my seat and halfway out of it. A Chinese mother left her twin babies on the side of the road. They lay there sleeping. And then the flashback evaporated. We were back in 1993, accompanying the old ladies to a church picnic. There had been no mention of - well, anything, really. And the babies, as it turned out, were still alive. And Mr. Panda, he was still alive, too - at least until the next flashback.
But I lucked out. And my students, to my surprise, enjoyed the movie. Or the first half of it, anyway. At the end of class, one of my students approached the computer wielding a USB stick.
"I want to copy movie," she said. She set to work. Paternally, I stepped forward to help, but this girl knew what she was doing. "Yes, I think this movie is very great. It address very deep, very serious topic. So I like it very much."
Mr. Panda, I thought to myself, you are on a roll. Narrowly averting international incidents day in and day out, yet still finding time to expose young Chinese college kids to the wonderful R-Rated world of human misery. Yes, the semester had been an unexpected success. In the beginning, my students didn't seem to understand a word I was saying. Stand up, I'd tell them, and everyone remained finger-trapped to their desks. But by the end, they could catch the asides that I often mumble to myself when nervous in front of 47 people. My students were wary at first, reluctant to trust the sermons I belted out from the pulpit about this schizophrenic and indefinably abstract entity we call America. But the kids warmed up to me after a while. They learned at least a handful of things that they won't forget anytime soon, I hope. Perhaps I blew no minds in the process, but I'd like to think that I inflated a few of them ever so slightly. And in retrospect, though I hadn't planned it, the semester seemed to possess a kind of internal symmetry: I opened with Lost in Translation and closed with The Joy Luck Club. Americans in Asia, Asians in America. The semester began with a text message from my supervisor - The class is start tomorrow! - and it ends on a similarly hectic lote - final exam, Saturday, loon!
There remains much to be frustrated with and much to improve upon. I walked into class this morning and asked the kids how they were doing.
"Nothing!" came the unanimous reply.
"Oh, no," I said, scrunching up my forehead like a surgeon who has just inadvertently killed his patient. "No, no. You are not nothing, my dears! You are something!"
And then there was the lecture I gave a couple weeks ago: "What Is An American?" Over the course of ninety minutes, I stripped (or tried to strip) away those pesky preconceptions my students have absorbed from years of gossip and Gossip Girls alike; that Americans are blonde, blue-eyed, hairy, rich, strong, tall, creative, grotesquely obese ... "What is an American?" I asked, wrapping things up. "An American is a human who lives in America." Some confused grunts, a laugh or two. I opened the floor for questions and a hand shot up in the far back of the room. A sophomore stood up and shifted nervously from foot to foot.
"But, Mr. Panda," she said, "how can Barack Obama be President of America if he is not American?"
This poor girl was no Birther. The Obama birth certificate controversy (not to mention the recent Tag Team imbroglio) hasn't quite made it out of the Bible Belt, and I doubt it will ever reach the Bamboo Belt. No, this girl was fundamentally puzzled as to how a black African could be President of the United States.
At the end of a long semester, and despite my best efforts, it remains inconceivable to many of my students that an American can be Dikembe Mutombo or Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Panda or Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and that all those variously colored individuals are more or less equally American.
Perhaps cultural pluralism is an idea my students can entertain in principle, but it seems more fancy than fact to them. Sure, there exist in the world such wonders as Siamese twins, and four-leaf clovers, and black swans, and Chinese women who smoke cigarettes - but these are anomalies and not the norm. And in a country like China, the norm is the norm. The Chinese are Chinese, and Americans should be American. Like Mr. Panda. Or maybe a little more handsome than Mr. Panda. And would it hurt if he shaved every once in a while?
"Come to the rear, please?"
"Oh, right, sure, no problem, okay!" I stammered.
"I have three things to tell," she said.
I could see where this was going already. Number one: a vague compliment. Number two: a schedule change, an upcoming Chinese holiday, a 93-year-old handyman coming to my apartment at such-and-such o'clock. It was number three that I was afraid of. Actually, I couldn't see where this was going at all.
"Number one," she said. "The final exam is start next week."
I painted over my astonishment with a dopey grin and a string of rapid-fire nods.
"Oh, that's cool. Like, next Monday?"
"That is number two," she said. "Next Wednesday you know is Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Monday and Tuesday there is no class. No class Monday and Tuesday. We will have class Saturday and Sunday in lieu."
In lieu? In the loo? I nodded, nodded, nodded.
"So we have a vacation? But not really?"
"Yes," she said, "vacation, but not really. So the final exam is begin on Saturday."
"The day after tomorrow. Excellent," I said, "and what's behind door number three?"
"Oh. Number three is, do you like singing a song?"
"Sometimes," I said, listing in my mind the conditions under which I have been known to sing publicly.
"I will go to KTV tomorrow loon," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Tomorrow loon I will go to KTV."
"... sorry?"
"KTV tomorrow loon."
The Sichuanese possess two of the world's more puzzling speech impediments. Surprisingly, the L/R dichotomy is a non-issue in Sichuan. My students can pronounce the word "ruler" without spraining their tongues, and the kids on the street certainly have no problem with "HELLO!" But in my leck of the woods, otherwise fluent speakers of Mandarin cannot seem to distinguish L from N. So the city in which I live is interchangeably called "Nanchong" or "Lanchong." Not even l/native N/Lanchongers can make up their minds on the issue. H and F are another trouble spot. My beard is either a fuzi or a huzi, depending on how rustic the barber is. And the Mandarin word for mediocre, mama huhu, already perhaps the best word in any language, is unquestionably improved by the Sichuanese pronunciation: mama fufu.
"Loon! Loon!" said my supervisor with mounting exasperation. Then, finally: "Noon!"
So my supervisor was proposing a karaoke date for tomorrow noon. I thought again of the conditions necessary for me to risk singing in public, and certainly stone sober at high noon with my supervisor in a simultaneously glitzy and dumpy karaoke room did not meet my crooning criteria. I nodded, nodded, nodded, and before I could weasel my way out of the appointment, found myself agreeing to meet her the next day at loon. Noon!
I've watched the first half of The Joy Luck Club exactly six times by now. I didn't have time to screen the movie before I showed it to my first batch of kids, just fired up the DVD player and let it fly, trusting that the R rating was on account of adult language and similarly adult themes, not full-frontal nudity or graphic sex scenes or realistic depictions of human dismemberment. A high school history teacher of mine used to quote a phrase, one that he seemed to believe he'd coined himself: when you ASSUME, you make an ass out of U and ME. ASS, U, ME. Assume. I'm not sure why he directed this at us, or at me in particular. Perhaps I assumed more than your average high school freshman. But this time I assumed correctly, making an ASS out of neither U nor ME. The Joy Luck Club wasn't raunchy at all. I was relieved: a wholesome family film about Chinese mothers and their daughters, Rated M for Mahjongg. But what I hadn't considered beforehand was precisely the one thing that should've been foremost in my mind in the first place: namely, whether the film contained any questionable, er, um, content.
So about fifteen minutes in, just as I was beginning to doodle flying dinosaurs in the margins of my notebook, I heard something that jolted me bolt upright in my seat and sent my blood pressure shooting up into the red, way up into the Limbaugh Zone.
"That's when I remembered what we could never talk about," said the narrator. "My mother had once told me this strange story about what happened to her in China."
A crowd of displaced Chinese men and women appeared on screen, hobbling forlornly up a gravel road. Burning buildings in the background. Screaming children. Jesus. I felt like screaming, myself. Instead, I sat perfectly still and sweated all over my flying dinosaurs and wondered whether Spherion Temp Services would take me back. Stupid, Mr. Panda. Really stupid. Now you've done it. Now you've made an ass out of U, ME, and - well, just U and ME, it looks like. But U'll be lucky if U and ME even have an ASS left after THEY are done with U. I rose slightly from my chair. I would walk right across the room and skip the movie ahead ten minutes. That's what I would do. A problem with the DVD, I would chuckle. But that was too obvious. So I stalled there for a moment, halfway in my seat and halfway out of it. A Chinese mother left her twin babies on the side of the road. They lay there sleeping. And then the flashback evaporated. We were back in 1993, accompanying the old ladies to a church picnic. There had been no mention of - well, anything, really. And the babies, as it turned out, were still alive. And Mr. Panda, he was still alive, too - at least until the next flashback.
But I lucked out. And my students, to my surprise, enjoyed the movie. Or the first half of it, anyway. At the end of class, one of my students approached the computer wielding a USB stick.
"I want to copy movie," she said. She set to work. Paternally, I stepped forward to help, but this girl knew what she was doing. "Yes, I think this movie is very great. It address very deep, very serious topic. So I like it very much."
Mr. Panda, I thought to myself, you are on a roll. Narrowly averting international incidents day in and day out, yet still finding time to expose young Chinese college kids to the wonderful R-Rated world of human misery. Yes, the semester had been an unexpected success. In the beginning, my students didn't seem to understand a word I was saying. Stand up, I'd tell them, and everyone remained finger-trapped to their desks. But by the end, they could catch the asides that I often mumble to myself when nervous in front of 47 people. My students were wary at first, reluctant to trust the sermons I belted out from the pulpit about this schizophrenic and indefinably abstract entity we call America. But the kids warmed up to me after a while. They learned at least a handful of things that they won't forget anytime soon, I hope. Perhaps I blew no minds in the process, but I'd like to think that I inflated a few of them ever so slightly. And in retrospect, though I hadn't planned it, the semester seemed to possess a kind of internal symmetry: I opened with Lost in Translation and closed with The Joy Luck Club. Americans in Asia, Asians in America. The semester began with a text message from my supervisor - The class is start tomorrow! - and it ends on a similarly hectic lote - final exam, Saturday, loon!
There remains much to be frustrated with and much to improve upon. I walked into class this morning and asked the kids how they were doing.
"Nothing!" came the unanimous reply.
"Oh, no," I said, scrunching up my forehead like a surgeon who has just inadvertently killed his patient. "No, no. You are not nothing, my dears! You are something!"
And then there was the lecture I gave a couple weeks ago: "What Is An American?" Over the course of ninety minutes, I stripped (or tried to strip) away those pesky preconceptions my students have absorbed from years of gossip and Gossip Girls alike; that Americans are blonde, blue-eyed, hairy, rich, strong, tall, creative, grotesquely obese ... "What is an American?" I asked, wrapping things up. "An American is a human who lives in America." Some confused grunts, a laugh or two. I opened the floor for questions and a hand shot up in the far back of the room. A sophomore stood up and shifted nervously from foot to foot.
"But, Mr. Panda," she said, "how can Barack Obama be President of America if he is not American?"
This poor girl was no Birther. The Obama birth certificate controversy (not to mention the recent Tag Team imbroglio) hasn't quite made it out of the Bible Belt, and I doubt it will ever reach the Bamboo Belt. No, this girl was fundamentally puzzled as to how a black African could be President of the United States.
At the end of a long semester, and despite my best efforts, it remains inconceivable to many of my students that an American can be Dikembe Mutombo or Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Panda or Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and that all those variously colored individuals are more or less equally American.
Perhaps cultural pluralism is an idea my students can entertain in principle, but it seems more fancy than fact to them. Sure, there exist in the world such wonders as Siamese twins, and four-leaf clovers, and black swans, and Chinese women who smoke cigarettes - but these are anomalies and not the norm. And in a country like China, the norm is the norm. The Chinese are Chinese, and Americans should be American. Like Mr. Panda. Or maybe a little more handsome than Mr. Panda. And would it hurt if he shaved every once in a while?
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Sick of Hellos/Sick of Goodbyes
I returned home from the Carsick Cars show with six kuai and a crumpled wad of pornographic pamphlets to my name. On the walk home, I dropped two of those six kuai on a bottle of frozen yogurt and stealthily slipped the crumpled wad of massage brochures into a public trash can when no one was looking. Then, on my way up the stairs, I stumbled and fell, smashing the glass yogurt bottle in my right hand. At first, I was bereaved by the loss of yogurt, which pooled in a jiggling mass of off-white slime and started somersaulting down the stairs like a semisolid Slinky. Then I noticed the black blood spurting from my hand. Well, hot damn. Though I felt no pain, I sensed that time was of the essence and I took the stairs up two at a time.
"HAH-LOO!" called my neighbor as I approached. He nudged his son. "Uncle! Uncle!"
"Hah-loo, uncle," the kid murmured.
I waved and a wallop of blood splashed audibly to the floor. My neighbor gasped. The kid let out a yelp and ran back inside.
"OH MY GATT. ARE - ARE YOU OKAY?"
"Hao, hao," I said, smiling. "I just need to go inside and fix this."
I shut the door behind me and trotted across the living room, blood raining all over the dirty t-shirts that carpet my apartment floor. I stood for a moment hemorrhaging into the kitchen sink before I realized that I wasn't at all sure how to go about treating a wound of this nature. So I retired to my study, sat down in front of the computer and tried to access Google. It was mysteriously out of order for the moment, so I settled for Yahoo.
"How to treat a cut," I punched out with my left hand. But the search only yielded information on sanitizing envelope-related injuries. I glanced at my right hand and saw that the drizzling blood had already filled the better part of a nearby cup of milk tea.
"How to dress a wound," I typed. Scrapes, nicks, diaper rashes. "How to dress a severe wound," I typed. Stabbings, shootings, farm machinery mishaps. At long last, I was getting somewhere. Step one, the instructions read, wash the shrapnel from the wond [sic] with clean water. I returned to the sink and flipped on the tap. A torrent of rust juice came squirting out. No. I ransacked the apartment for a bottle of Nongfu Springs, finding naught but a single half-empty bottle of Nongfu Orange Juice. The wound instructions mentioned nothing about O.J., and the O.J. instructions mentioned nothing about wounds. So I slipped on my favorite blue hoodie, stashed my bloody hand in the kangaroo pouch, and made a dash for the nearest convenience store.
By the time I'd hoofed the fifteen minutes across campus, my sweater was already soaked through with ominous amounts of dark blood. I grew faint. A kind of giddy delirium blossomed in my brain. I began to hobble, then to stumble. And when I finally arrived at the bright lights of the university's strip of meat-related capitalism, I was suddenly reminded, as though I had forgotten, that I was still in China. Here came the HAH-LOO birds.
HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
I ignored them. They were college twerps, drunk and unemployed, and here I was, a 27-year-old laowai bleeding to death on a crowded street. And on a school night! The college twerps followed.
HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
I walked faster. Rivulets of blood trickled down the side of my jeans.
HEY! FOREIGNER! HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
Enough. I snapped. I stopped, turned around, and in the loudest voice I have ever yet mustered in my life, I shouted HAH-LOO!, HAH-LOO!, HAH-LOO! But I did not win the effect I had hoped for. The college kids were triumphant. We got a big one this time! They turned and ran giggling into the fetid Nanchong night.
If nothing else, the misspent adrenaline kept me conscious long enough to complete my mission. I bought two big bottles of Nongfu Springs from my usual convenience store clerk. She raised an eyebrow as I navigated the whole transaction with my left hand.
"No beer?" she asked.
"Oh, no," I said. "No, no. No beer."
She raised a second eyebrow. Then she asked if I wanted to play with her tortoiseshell kitten, as I usually do.
"Oh, heh. Maybe next ti - "
HAH-LOO! a man shouted in my face. I turned and walked out the door.
I followed the trail of Panda blood all the way back home. I was amazed at and somewhat proud of the amount of gore and yogurt I had left behind in the stairwell. I returned to the sink and doused the wound in Nongfu Springs. The water seemed to sizzle upon contact. I winced and retreated to my bedroom. I flipped the light on and the bulb exploded. In darkness, I fumbled through heaps of unwashed laundry and stacks of unread books for my Peace Corps Medical Kit. I unclasped the plastic hasps with my left hand and groped around in the dark. A dimebag of Un-Aspirin. A spritzer of bug spray. Sunscreen. Antihistamine. Nasal decongestant. Oral antidehydration salts. Condoms. More condoms. Tube after tube of Astroglide. A pair of surgical scissors. I shuddered. Then, finally, I came across what I'd been groping for: a bottle of Betasept, some sterile gauze pads, and a roll of Ace Bandage Wraps.
I cleansed the wound once more in the healing waters of Nongfu Spring, then I attacked it with Betasept. The stuff wasted no time in getting down to business: my field of vision went white and I found myself desecrating every religious personage known to Christendom. Then the pain ebbed away and I calmly wrapped the wound, humming a John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman tune as I worked. Done and done. En route to my study, I surveyed the scene. Man alive, man. Like they'd filmed Saw 7 in my living room. Then I sat back down at the computer and, I don't know, vanity Googled myself or something.
The next day, using my gory right hand as a prop, I successfully taught my students the words yogurt, clumsy, and dumbass. On Tuesday, my neighbor invited me in for watermelon. I flopped down on his couch and made an earnest effort to devour three kilograms of my least favorite fruit. My neighbor squinted at my hand the whole time and finally asked me how I'd hurt myself. For want of a Chinese vocabulary, I went the Tina Turner route and told him that I'd fallen down the stairs. He nodded dubiously. Then, after I'd spit little black seeds all over his parquet floor, apologizing after each errant shot, I stood up and thanked him for the hospitality. And the watermelon. I extended my hand. He bowed and squeezed the hell out of it and a jet of black blood shot across the room.
"Oh my Gatt!"
"Jesus," I said. "My bad. Sorry. I -"
"No, is okay!"
"Man. I'm really sorry. I just - "
"Is nothing, nothing!"
My sloppily dressed wound healed with a quickness that was nothing short of miraculous. By Wednesday, a garden variety Band-Aid got the job done and my students no longer asked questions. By Thursday morning, I could do push-ups again without having to mop the floor afterward. I did four of them, then I checked my email and was pleasantly surprised to find all sorts of messages from my friends back home. "Jeff Hines, you old dog!" I crooned as I clicked on the first email and waited eagerly for it to unfurl. The words materialized on screen: Jason died today. I blinked and clicked on to the next message, from my long-lost Beasley: I don't know how to put this ... surgery ... complications ... I sat very still for a while. I got up to change my Band-Aid. Then I sat back down. And the day went by in time lapse.
My old friend Jason had passed away. I had known him since the seventh grade. He was one of the charter members of our high school commune of misfits, pseudo-punks, and apostate Mormons. At an age when I was seeping miserably into the late-90's janglepop oeuvre of Counting Crows and Matchbox 20, Jason introduced me to Sparklehorse, Camper Van Beethoven, Pink Floyd, and a long list of iconoclasts I still listen to today, while my moth-eaten janglepop collection decomposes in an attic somewhere in suburban Nebraska. Jason had survived open-heart surgery as a child, had heart problems all his life, was a regular at the Offutt Air Force Base emergency room. So his death didn't exactly hit me out of the blue. But when you're young, or young enough to believe that you are young, everything hits you out of the blue.
For several hours, not a single articulate thought formed in my head. All was blank. But after a while, as the sun sank below the vacant 32-story apartment building on the hill, the wheels started turning again, and I began to ask the sort of questions I imagine most people ask upon the loss of an old friend. When did I see him last? What did we talk about? What was the last thing he said to me? I struggled to remember. Was it ... no, couldn't have been. But maybe ... Then - ah, yes. It must have been a year ago. Early summer in Nebraska. It was a UFC party, a suitably geeky occasion, at Jonathon Payne's house. You and Beasley showed up at Payne's doorstep around ten with a sixer of Old Style. You hadn't seen Payne in years. You knew him as his mid-pubescent Trekkie incarnation - Coke bottle glasses and socks with sandals, a bowl cut and a dirtstache - so you were surprised and more than a little depressed to walk in and find Payne surrounded by a throng of disproportionately hot platinum blondes in haltertops.
"Oh, hey guys," Payne called. "Beer's in the fridge."
Then he absconded to the basement with his harem. Giggles bubbled up through the air vents. You and Beasley sat there in the empty living room and shot the bull, idly watching men kick the shit out of each other on the flatscreen in HD. Together, you polished off 66.666% of the sixer. Then the doorbell rang. Payne did not come upstairs to answer it. You were surprised to find Jason at the door. You greeted him with a tallboy. Then the three of you sat there for hours talking about, well, music, what else?
It wasn't such a bad last memory, when I thought about it. I began to feel less guilty about Jason's death. More selfish concerns came to mind: Jason was 28 and I am 27. He had heart problems. Once upon a time, I had heart problems. I lit a cigarette and glared at the pack. Stupid. Jason was the first of my friends to pass away. All my teenaged and twentysomething delusions of immortality suddenly seemed as ramshackle as a Council Bluffs patio. But I am young, I told myself. I am 27, which is still young. And yet ... I snubbed out my cigarette in a rice bowl. Stupid. I needed to get out of the apartment. Take a walk, go for a run. Something. I needed to get out. So I slipped on my favorite blood-encrusted blue hoodie and scurried out of the apartment.
Ah, yes. As though I'd forgotten: China. On my way out the door, I was greeted by a couple of two-year-olds who pointed at me and shouted lao-wai, lao-wai, lao-wai! Jesus, I thought, does it begin that early? These kids can't even walk, can hardly speak, and yet they sure as shooting know a foreign devil when they see one. I could imagine their parents, holding up flash cards at the dinner table. What animal is this? It's a tiger! What animal is this? It's a dog! And what animal is this? (A blurry Polaroid of Zach Galifianakis) It's a laowai!
I walked. I orbited the university's manmade lake, its nocturnal beasts silent and sleeping in the late evening sun. Up until eleven o'clock, there are young couples making out on the benches along the lake. Then the young couples scurry home to beat curfew and the nocturnal beasts come alive and the night starts to sound like Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album I'm sure Jason enjoyed. An album I enjoy. "Foreigner," murmured a Chinese couple as they passed. "Chinese couple," I said.
I circled the manmade lake for a while, then I trekked the five miles to the city proper. It had rained the day before, so the shoddily lain sidewalk tiles belched up mud and live toads with every step. Then the sidewalk ran out and I walked along the shoulder of a two-lane highway for several miles, the cabbies executing kamikaze lane changes with inebriated nonchalance, the dump trucks billowing black chalk and screeching their horns as they clattered past. The air was metallic, the noise deafening. But it felt good to be outside, to be alive and walking, to be touched however feebly by the sidewards glance of the Sichuanese sun.
When I'd arrived downtown, I decided to buy some cleaning products at the supermarket. It seemed like an opportune time to tidy up my apartment. To start anew. And maybe I'd buy a six-pack of Carlsberg and dump one of the cans out in my bloody sink, in memoriam. And to sterilize the sink, perhaps. I checked my backpack at the front desk and I grabbed a shopping basket. As soon as I'd passed through the turnstile, a couple of college girls shouted foreigner! and started following me.
They followed at a close distance, no more than four feet away, pointing and laughing all the while. For a full five minutes, I pretended to be fascinated with a women's deodorant display in the hopes that they would find something better to do. But I was the best show in town. Horrified, I realized they could watch me for hours. So I wandered all the way to the opposite end of the supermarket. They gave chase. Then I executed a military about-face, the one my dad taught me as a kid, and wandered all the way back to the women's deodorant display. And there the girls were, four feet behind me, pointing and laughing, laughing and laughing. Perhaps in another part of the world, I might've been flattered - but I know China well enough by now to understand that when a girl laughs at me in public, it isn't because of the rakish figure that I cut, but because I am an oafish-looking foreigner. I possess about as much sex appeal in China as Louie Anderson, which may be an over- or understatement, depending on your opinion of Louie Anderson.
I hid out in the tea aisle for a moment before jetting off to the toilet paper aisle. Then, in the pest repellent aisle, I removed and replaced several cannisters of Raid while the girls looked on and laughed. I wanted to pull my beard out, but what could be done? Finally, I walked very deliberately to the most secluded corner of the adult beverage aisle, turned to the girls, and asked, in Chinese, "Why are you following me?"
The college girls acted so dumbfounded that for an instant I almost believed that they had never been following me in the first place. But no, I reminded myself, these girls had followed me for fifteen minutes, had laughed at me and mocked me as I struggled through the already odious task of shopping. And they were women, more or less, these girls. So I was justified in asserting myself just this once, wasn't I? I mean, wasn't I? I was an adult, after all. They were adults. A crowd had gathered to watch the confrontation unfold, and I knew already whose side they were on.
"Why are you following me?" I asked once more, trying to weigh my voice down with paternal authority, only to hear it come warbling from my larynx like a prolonged, high-pitched blast of flatulence. The girls trembled with newly acquired innocence. The crowd glared at me.
"I am a human being," I said unconvincingly. "You are human beings. I came here to buy things. You came here to buy things. So let's buy things!"
My appeal to capitalism did not seem to win anyone over, not right away.
"But please don't follow me," I went on. "I've had a bad day, and it's very annoying to be followed and laughed at."
The girls did not answer, offended as they were by my brash behavior.
"Very annoying," I said, and walked away.
Upon my departure, the crowd clucked their collective tongue and offered condolences to those poor college girls for having suffered the verbal abuse of an obviously deranged and profoundly hairy/sweaty foreigner. But, I thought to myself, it was entirely true that I had had a bad day. And the girls had been following me. And a Chinese man my age would have responded with at least ten times as much hostility. I had merely asserted myself, politely and in a voice that was so soft and feeble as to warrant even more laughter. And surely a man who deals with xenophobic taunting and less-than-admiring admirers day in and day out is entitled to one or two self-assertion cards a year? I mean, isn't he? It was no use. I could not prop myself up. As I often do after asserting myself, I sank into a troth of self-loathing guilt.
But no matter, I said. It's behind you. And so are the college girls, watching and laughing from a safe distance of twenty feet. I wound up buying several bottles of bleach, a 24-pack of toilet paper, a pair of rubber gloves, and a six-pack of Carlsberg. The cashier, like almost all the supermarket employees I encounter in Nanchong, turned out to be one of my former students. She waved as I approached and called me by my Chinese name, Pan Da, which is the password that unlocks my civility. I brightened suddenly, asked her how she was doing, how long she worked every day, why she wasn't teaching Engl - no, that question was off limits. She gave me only short answers and didn't look up at me once, either because her manager was watching, or because she was more than fascinated by the array of sanitizing and brain-sanitizing goods I had purchased.
On my way out, I was very nearly peed on by a baby who, with the blessing of her nearby mother, suddenly decided to pop a squat on the floor, right there in the doorway of a Rolex shop. I couldn't help but look. It is an image that promises to endure in my brain even after a million Carlsbergs, China summed up in a single stomach-churning, heart-rending tableau: a baby, squatting and copiously urinating in the doorway of a Rolex retailer. And meanwhile, China sped past at 1.3 billion RPM. The crowds swirled around the baby, then instinctively stepped over the puddle she left behind, stopping only to crane their necks and scream out their friendly greetings and salutations at the oafish-looking laowai who was by then a mere hairy speck on the fluorescent horizon.
"HAH-LOO!" called my neighbor as I approached. He nudged his son. "Uncle! Uncle!"
"Hah-loo, uncle," the kid murmured.
I waved and a wallop of blood splashed audibly to the floor. My neighbor gasped. The kid let out a yelp and ran back inside.
"OH MY GATT. ARE - ARE YOU OKAY?"
"Hao, hao," I said, smiling. "I just need to go inside and fix this."
I shut the door behind me and trotted across the living room, blood raining all over the dirty t-shirts that carpet my apartment floor. I stood for a moment hemorrhaging into the kitchen sink before I realized that I wasn't at all sure how to go about treating a wound of this nature. So I retired to my study, sat down in front of the computer and tried to access Google. It was mysteriously out of order for the moment, so I settled for Yahoo.
"How to treat a cut," I punched out with my left hand. But the search only yielded information on sanitizing envelope-related injuries. I glanced at my right hand and saw that the drizzling blood had already filled the better part of a nearby cup of milk tea.
"How to dress a wound," I typed. Scrapes, nicks, diaper rashes. "How to dress a severe wound," I typed. Stabbings, shootings, farm machinery mishaps. At long last, I was getting somewhere. Step one, the instructions read, wash the shrapnel from the wond [sic] with clean water. I returned to the sink and flipped on the tap. A torrent of rust juice came squirting out. No. I ransacked the apartment for a bottle of Nongfu Springs, finding naught but a single half-empty bottle of Nongfu Orange Juice. The wound instructions mentioned nothing about O.J., and the O.J. instructions mentioned nothing about wounds. So I slipped on my favorite blue hoodie, stashed my bloody hand in the kangaroo pouch, and made a dash for the nearest convenience store.
By the time I'd hoofed the fifteen minutes across campus, my sweater was already soaked through with ominous amounts of dark blood. I grew faint. A kind of giddy delirium blossomed in my brain. I began to hobble, then to stumble. And when I finally arrived at the bright lights of the university's strip of meat-related capitalism, I was suddenly reminded, as though I had forgotten, that I was still in China. Here came the HAH-LOO birds.
HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
I ignored them. They were college twerps, drunk and unemployed, and here I was, a 27-year-old laowai bleeding to death on a crowded street. And on a school night! The college twerps followed.
HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
I walked faster. Rivulets of blood trickled down the side of my jeans.
HEY! FOREIGNER! HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
Enough. I snapped. I stopped, turned around, and in the loudest voice I have ever yet mustered in my life, I shouted HAH-LOO!, HAH-LOO!, HAH-LOO! But I did not win the effect I had hoped for. The college kids were triumphant. We got a big one this time! They turned and ran giggling into the fetid Nanchong night.
If nothing else, the misspent adrenaline kept me conscious long enough to complete my mission. I bought two big bottles of Nongfu Springs from my usual convenience store clerk. She raised an eyebrow as I navigated the whole transaction with my left hand.
"No beer?" she asked.
"Oh, no," I said. "No, no. No beer."
She raised a second eyebrow. Then she asked if I wanted to play with her tortoiseshell kitten, as I usually do.
"Oh, heh. Maybe next ti - "
HAH-LOO! a man shouted in my face. I turned and walked out the door.
I followed the trail of Panda blood all the way back home. I was amazed at and somewhat proud of the amount of gore and yogurt I had left behind in the stairwell. I returned to the sink and doused the wound in Nongfu Springs. The water seemed to sizzle upon contact. I winced and retreated to my bedroom. I flipped the light on and the bulb exploded. In darkness, I fumbled through heaps of unwashed laundry and stacks of unread books for my Peace Corps Medical Kit. I unclasped the plastic hasps with my left hand and groped around in the dark. A dimebag of Un-Aspirin. A spritzer of bug spray. Sunscreen. Antihistamine. Nasal decongestant. Oral antidehydration salts. Condoms. More condoms. Tube after tube of Astroglide. A pair of surgical scissors. I shuddered. Then, finally, I came across what I'd been groping for: a bottle of Betasept, some sterile gauze pads, and a roll of Ace Bandage Wraps.
I cleansed the wound once more in the healing waters of Nongfu Spring, then I attacked it with Betasept. The stuff wasted no time in getting down to business: my field of vision went white and I found myself desecrating every religious personage known to Christendom. Then the pain ebbed away and I calmly wrapped the wound, humming a John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman tune as I worked. Done and done. En route to my study, I surveyed the scene. Man alive, man. Like they'd filmed Saw 7 in my living room. Then I sat back down at the computer and, I don't know, vanity Googled myself or something.
The next day, using my gory right hand as a prop, I successfully taught my students the words yogurt, clumsy, and dumbass. On Tuesday, my neighbor invited me in for watermelon. I flopped down on his couch and made an earnest effort to devour three kilograms of my least favorite fruit. My neighbor squinted at my hand the whole time and finally asked me how I'd hurt myself. For want of a Chinese vocabulary, I went the Tina Turner route and told him that I'd fallen down the stairs. He nodded dubiously. Then, after I'd spit little black seeds all over his parquet floor, apologizing after each errant shot, I stood up and thanked him for the hospitality. And the watermelon. I extended my hand. He bowed and squeezed the hell out of it and a jet of black blood shot across the room.
"Oh my Gatt!"
"Jesus," I said. "My bad. Sorry. I -"
"No, is okay!"
"Man. I'm really sorry. I just - "
"Is nothing, nothing!"
My sloppily dressed wound healed with a quickness that was nothing short of miraculous. By Wednesday, a garden variety Band-Aid got the job done and my students no longer asked questions. By Thursday morning, I could do push-ups again without having to mop the floor afterward. I did four of them, then I checked my email and was pleasantly surprised to find all sorts of messages from my friends back home. "Jeff Hines, you old dog!" I crooned as I clicked on the first email and waited eagerly for it to unfurl. The words materialized on screen: Jason died today. I blinked and clicked on to the next message, from my long-lost Beasley: I don't know how to put this ... surgery ... complications ... I sat very still for a while. I got up to change my Band-Aid. Then I sat back down. And the day went by in time lapse.
My old friend Jason had passed away. I had known him since the seventh grade. He was one of the charter members of our high school commune of misfits, pseudo-punks, and apostate Mormons. At an age when I was seeping miserably into the late-90's janglepop oeuvre of Counting Crows and Matchbox 20, Jason introduced me to Sparklehorse, Camper Van Beethoven, Pink Floyd, and a long list of iconoclasts I still listen to today, while my moth-eaten janglepop collection decomposes in an attic somewhere in suburban Nebraska. Jason had survived open-heart surgery as a child, had heart problems all his life, was a regular at the Offutt Air Force Base emergency room. So his death didn't exactly hit me out of the blue. But when you're young, or young enough to believe that you are young, everything hits you out of the blue.
For several hours, not a single articulate thought formed in my head. All was blank. But after a while, as the sun sank below the vacant 32-story apartment building on the hill, the wheels started turning again, and I began to ask the sort of questions I imagine most people ask upon the loss of an old friend. When did I see him last? What did we talk about? What was the last thing he said to me? I struggled to remember. Was it ... no, couldn't have been. But maybe ... Then - ah, yes. It must have been a year ago. Early summer in Nebraska. It was a UFC party, a suitably geeky occasion, at Jonathon Payne's house. You and Beasley showed up at Payne's doorstep around ten with a sixer of Old Style. You hadn't seen Payne in years. You knew him as his mid-pubescent Trekkie incarnation - Coke bottle glasses and socks with sandals, a bowl cut and a dirtstache - so you were surprised and more than a little depressed to walk in and find Payne surrounded by a throng of disproportionately hot platinum blondes in haltertops.
"Oh, hey guys," Payne called. "Beer's in the fridge."
Then he absconded to the basement with his harem. Giggles bubbled up through the air vents. You and Beasley sat there in the empty living room and shot the bull, idly watching men kick the shit out of each other on the flatscreen in HD. Together, you polished off 66.666% of the sixer. Then the doorbell rang. Payne did not come upstairs to answer it. You were surprised to find Jason at the door. You greeted him with a tallboy. Then the three of you sat there for hours talking about, well, music, what else?
It wasn't such a bad last memory, when I thought about it. I began to feel less guilty about Jason's death. More selfish concerns came to mind: Jason was 28 and I am 27. He had heart problems. Once upon a time, I had heart problems. I lit a cigarette and glared at the pack. Stupid. Jason was the first of my friends to pass away. All my teenaged and twentysomething delusions of immortality suddenly seemed as ramshackle as a Council Bluffs patio. But I am young, I told myself. I am 27, which is still young. And yet ... I snubbed out my cigarette in a rice bowl. Stupid. I needed to get out of the apartment. Take a walk, go for a run. Something. I needed to get out. So I slipped on my favorite blood-encrusted blue hoodie and scurried out of the apartment.
Ah, yes. As though I'd forgotten: China. On my way out the door, I was greeted by a couple of two-year-olds who pointed at me and shouted lao-wai, lao-wai, lao-wai! Jesus, I thought, does it begin that early? These kids can't even walk, can hardly speak, and yet they sure as shooting know a foreign devil when they see one. I could imagine their parents, holding up flash cards at the dinner table. What animal is this? It's a tiger! What animal is this? It's a dog! And what animal is this? (A blurry Polaroid of Zach Galifianakis) It's a laowai!
I walked. I orbited the university's manmade lake, its nocturnal beasts silent and sleeping in the late evening sun. Up until eleven o'clock, there are young couples making out on the benches along the lake. Then the young couples scurry home to beat curfew and the nocturnal beasts come alive and the night starts to sound like Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album I'm sure Jason enjoyed. An album I enjoy. "Foreigner," murmured a Chinese couple as they passed. "Chinese couple," I said.
I circled the manmade lake for a while, then I trekked the five miles to the city proper. It had rained the day before, so the shoddily lain sidewalk tiles belched up mud and live toads with every step. Then the sidewalk ran out and I walked along the shoulder of a two-lane highway for several miles, the cabbies executing kamikaze lane changes with inebriated nonchalance, the dump trucks billowing black chalk and screeching their horns as they clattered past. The air was metallic, the noise deafening. But it felt good to be outside, to be alive and walking, to be touched however feebly by the sidewards glance of the Sichuanese sun.
When I'd arrived downtown, I decided to buy some cleaning products at the supermarket. It seemed like an opportune time to tidy up my apartment. To start anew. And maybe I'd buy a six-pack of Carlsberg and dump one of the cans out in my bloody sink, in memoriam. And to sterilize the sink, perhaps. I checked my backpack at the front desk and I grabbed a shopping basket. As soon as I'd passed through the turnstile, a couple of college girls shouted foreigner! and started following me.
They followed at a close distance, no more than four feet away, pointing and laughing all the while. For a full five minutes, I pretended to be fascinated with a women's deodorant display in the hopes that they would find something better to do. But I was the best show in town. Horrified, I realized they could watch me for hours. So I wandered all the way to the opposite end of the supermarket. They gave chase. Then I executed a military about-face, the one my dad taught me as a kid, and wandered all the way back to the women's deodorant display. And there the girls were, four feet behind me, pointing and laughing, laughing and laughing. Perhaps in another part of the world, I might've been flattered - but I know China well enough by now to understand that when a girl laughs at me in public, it isn't because of the rakish figure that I cut, but because I am an oafish-looking foreigner. I possess about as much sex appeal in China as Louie Anderson, which may be an over- or understatement, depending on your opinion of Louie Anderson.
I hid out in the tea aisle for a moment before jetting off to the toilet paper aisle. Then, in the pest repellent aisle, I removed and replaced several cannisters of Raid while the girls looked on and laughed. I wanted to pull my beard out, but what could be done? Finally, I walked very deliberately to the most secluded corner of the adult beverage aisle, turned to the girls, and asked, in Chinese, "Why are you following me?"
The college girls acted so dumbfounded that for an instant I almost believed that they had never been following me in the first place. But no, I reminded myself, these girls had followed me for fifteen minutes, had laughed at me and mocked me as I struggled through the already odious task of shopping. And they were women, more or less, these girls. So I was justified in asserting myself just this once, wasn't I? I mean, wasn't I? I was an adult, after all. They were adults. A crowd had gathered to watch the confrontation unfold, and I knew already whose side they were on.
"Why are you following me?" I asked once more, trying to weigh my voice down with paternal authority, only to hear it come warbling from my larynx like a prolonged, high-pitched blast of flatulence. The girls trembled with newly acquired innocence. The crowd glared at me.
"I am a human being," I said unconvincingly. "You are human beings. I came here to buy things. You came here to buy things. So let's buy things!"
My appeal to capitalism did not seem to win anyone over, not right away.
"But please don't follow me," I went on. "I've had a bad day, and it's very annoying to be followed and laughed at."
The girls did not answer, offended as they were by my brash behavior.
"Very annoying," I said, and walked away.
Upon my departure, the crowd clucked their collective tongue and offered condolences to those poor college girls for having suffered the verbal abuse of an obviously deranged and profoundly hairy/sweaty foreigner. But, I thought to myself, it was entirely true that I had had a bad day. And the girls had been following me. And a Chinese man my age would have responded with at least ten times as much hostility. I had merely asserted myself, politely and in a voice that was so soft and feeble as to warrant even more laughter. And surely a man who deals with xenophobic taunting and less-than-admiring admirers day in and day out is entitled to one or two self-assertion cards a year? I mean, isn't he? It was no use. I could not prop myself up. As I often do after asserting myself, I sank into a troth of self-loathing guilt.
But no matter, I said. It's behind you. And so are the college girls, watching and laughing from a safe distance of twenty feet. I wound up buying several bottles of bleach, a 24-pack of toilet paper, a pair of rubber gloves, and a six-pack of Carlsberg. The cashier, like almost all the supermarket employees I encounter in Nanchong, turned out to be one of my former students. She waved as I approached and called me by my Chinese name, Pan Da, which is the password that unlocks my civility. I brightened suddenly, asked her how she was doing, how long she worked every day, why she wasn't teaching Engl - no, that question was off limits. She gave me only short answers and didn't look up at me once, either because her manager was watching, or because she was more than fascinated by the array of sanitizing and brain-sanitizing goods I had purchased.
On my way out, I was very nearly peed on by a baby who, with the blessing of her nearby mother, suddenly decided to pop a squat on the floor, right there in the doorway of a Rolex shop. I couldn't help but look. It is an image that promises to endure in my brain even after a million Carlsbergs, China summed up in a single stomach-churning, heart-rending tableau: a baby, squatting and copiously urinating in the doorway of a Rolex retailer. And meanwhile, China sped past at 1.3 billion RPM. The crowds swirled around the baby, then instinctively stepped over the puddle she left behind, stopping only to crane their necks and scream out their friendly greetings and salutations at the oafish-looking laowai who was by then a mere hairy speck on the fluorescent horizon.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Homesick Homes
The name of the place was "Nuts." My taxi driver, a real down-home salt-of-the-earth type, swerved the cab up onto the sidewalk and announced in his swampy river city drawl that we had arrived. We were parked in front of a joint called The Hurricane, the kind of glitzy dive where salarymen go to projectile vomit all over each other. The door swung open and a middle-aged man in a shiny suitcoat came tumbling out onto the street. He vomited emphatically. Then he brushed himself off and tumbled back into The Hurricane. Briefly, as the door swung shut behind him, I could hear someone murdering Celine Dion.
"I don't think this is the place," I said.
I searched my crummy cellphone dictionary for the word "nut" and showed the cabby a string of symbols that probably amounted to "testicle." He hawked a loogey and shook his head disgustedly. Then he rolled down the window to consult the roadside riffraff. They hobbled over to stare at me. And the riffraff, too, insisted that I had arrived at Nuts. I shrugged and paid the cabby, who charged me an additional riffraff consultation fee. Then he backhandedly complimented my Chinese while the roadside riffraff smacked their bamboo sticks against the pavement laughing at me. Welcome to China! the cabbby called out the window as he sped off into oncoming traffic.
I have learned over the years to do the exact opposite of what my sense of direction tells me to do, so the moment my sneakers hit the loogey-slick pavement, I turned away from the light and walked toward the darkness. I passed a China Construction Bank, an octopus tentacle vendor, a boarded-up porn shop, and then I came upon an oasis of black-shirted Chinese hipsters, smoking and drinking in the lamplight of an unmarked door. The door flew open and a James Brown B-side came bubbling out. This was no longer China. This, at last, was Nuts.
After I'd passed through customs and checked my backpack at the bar, I wandered right into the midst of a middle school sockhop: boys lined up along one wall, girls along the other. Straightening my collar, I coughed and looked around. Then I situated myself next to the foosball table and shuffled around until a pack of Chinese hipsters relegated me to the narrow slot between an overfull trashcan and a Samsung AC Unit.
Okay, I told myself, be cool. You are American. You are from Omaha. But a year had passed since my last indie rock show - St. Vincent at The Slowdown - and my pre-show shuffle was all out of whack. I found myself at a total loss for what to do during those tense moments before the stage lights came up. I gazed down at my Pumas and shuffled. I gazed up at the vacant stage and shuffled. I made eye contact with a spooky-looking foreigner. I gazed back down at my Pumas. Then I shuffled off to grab a beer.
"Shenme pijiu? Heineken, Hoegaarden, Duwel, Guinness - "
The bartendress made no mention of Tsingtao, or its more lethal counterpart, Snow. Clearly, I was not in Nanchong anymore. I ordered a Carlsberg.
"Oh, and do you sell cigarettes?"
"Zhong Nan Hai," she shrugged.
"What?"
"Zhong Nan Hai."
"Eh?"
She took a carton down from the shelf and held it up to my face.
"Zhooooong. Naaaaan," she said, underlining the characters as she read them. "Hai."
Aha! It clicked. Zhong Nan Hai: a brand of Chinese cigarettes, and incidentally, the name of the first track on the Carsick Cars' self-titled album. Of course! Why hadn't I noticed that before? I'd listened to Zhong Nan Hai hundreds of times and I'd smoked my share of Zhong Nan Hais in the meanwhile. Perhaps I'd even smoked a Zhong Nan Hai whilst listening to Zhong Nan Hai. And yet I'd never made the connection: Carsick Cars, the smartest rock band China has to offer, had written an ode to Zhong Nan Hais, the cheapest, most carcinogenic cigarette China has to offer.
I drifted back to my putrescent shuffling spot. I chatted with a Frenchman until his friends showed up. He bid me au revoir. Then a Dutchman chatted with me until my friends showed up. I bid him vaarwel. A heartwarming Peace Corps reunion ensued. Hugs all around.
"Nice haircut."
"Nice beard. How long you been here?"
"Not long," I shrugged. "Five minutes."
Vijay and I got ourselves mutually drunk on cheap tequila. The opening act - a riotgrrly punk trio named 24 Hours - took the stage. They launched into a jam called "Walrus" and the Chinese hipsters trickled down to the floor. The set did not last 24 hours, though it did include a twelve-minute rendition of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang." Then the lights came up. The Chinese hipsters reassumed their positions - boys on one side, girls on the other - while the motley foreigners pooled in the middle.
Another James Brown B-side. I shuffled and looked around. Where was everybody? In China, you'll be hard-pressed to find a square foot of space that isn't occupied by another human being, and yet here it was: Friday night, a rock show, and Nuts was more half-empty than half-full. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings: Carsick Cars, a band that has toured with Sonic Youth, has appeared in NME, has rubbed elbows with David Byrne - arguably the only Chinese rock band in China, performing for the first time in Chongqing, arguably the largest city in the world. And yet a mere 75 people had turned out for the show, many of them the sort of foreigners you wouldn't want to bump into in a dark alley. Or a well-lit one, for that matter.
So much the better, I figured. All the more permanent ear damage for me. I shuffled around, Carlsberg in hand, almost childishly stoked. In a sense, I'd been looking forward to the Carsick Cars show since the very moment I arrived in China. Not long after I'd adjusted to life in a country whose thesis is harmony through uniformity, I began to long for its antithesis. Diversity. Dissonance. Dissent. And though for eight months I went without knowing the name "Carsick Cars," I knew all along that something like Carsick Cars just had to exist in China, just as I knew that Chengdu, a city of twelve million, simply had to have a Mexican restaurant (if only one of them) ((and not a very good one, at that)).
Carsick Cars were something of an epiphany for me. I became an instant admirer. I listened to their eponymous album for months on end. Naturally, the next step was to see them live and in concert. But Carsick Cars had just embarked on a world tour and, last I'd checked, were playing a house party with David Byrne in Marfa, Texas - so I figured lowly Chongqing with its legions of loogey-hawking cab drivers couldn't be very high on their list. Until sometime last week, when a friend of mine handed me a crumpled-up flier and mumbled, "You heard of these guys?"
"Carsick Cars," I read. "24 Hours. Nuts."
I was going. That's all there was to it. I went to work. I smoked pack after pack of Zhong Nan Hais. Meanwhile, my expectations ballooned beyond all reasonable proportion. This was huge. Hendrix at Woodstock. Elvis Costello on Saturday Night Live. Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall. Carsick Cars at Nuts. I Febreezed my beard and hung my Radiohead t-shirt up to dry. I practiced my pre-show shuffle alone in my room. The week Febreezed by and at no point did it enter my mind that the long-awaited Carsick Cars show might not prove to be one of those epic rock 'n roll fuck-you gestures of lore. At no point did I consider that it might just turn out to be a pretty good indie rock show.
When Carsick Cars took the stage, nobody seemed to know who they were. While the band tuned up, the pit remained empty. Boys on one side, girls on the other. A line at the bar.
"Is that them?" I asked Vijay.
"Naw, I think there's a chick in the band," he said, "or at least a dude who looks like a chick."
"These dudes all look like dudes," I said, and checked the flier. "Maybe there's another opener. Maybe they're up nex - "
The lead singer leaned into the microphone: Women shi Carsick Cars. I shrugged. Vijay shrugged. And together we waltzed across the pit until we were right up against the stage.
In China, there is a code of rock 'n roll etiquette which dictates that rock stars must first politely greet their audience, then thank a litany of sponsors and salarymen, then chit-chat with the audience before introducing each and every song by name. In that respect, Carsick Cars were not very Chinese. They opened with feedback. They closed with feedback. One song screeched into the next. There was no stage banter, no smiles. Carsick Cars were at work. In a country that appreciates rock-as-novelty, makeup and leather jackets, girlish dudes with funky hair riffing on Pachelbel's Canon - here was a band of unattractive nerds whose palette was precisely sculpted noise. All and all, it was pretty good.
I am not a hit monger. I didn't clamor for "Creep" when I saw Radiohead at Wuhlheide, nor did I wet myself when Beck unexpectedly played "Loser" at the Columbiahalle in Berlin. I once saw a guy named Dan Wilson play at The Waiting Room in Omaha, and though his voice sounded awfully familiar, it wasn't until some buffoon shouted "Closing Time!" that I recognized him as the lead singer of Semisonic. And to his credit, Dan Wilson played fifteen songs nobody knew or cared about, then slipped quietly out the back door when no one was looking. So I respect musicians who do their own thing, and at shows, I try to stifle the Free Bird impulse. Nevertheless, I grew increasingly anxious as Carsick Cars plowed through one song after another - were they going to play it? You know, the song about ... the thing? With each opening riff, Erin and I glanced at each other and perked our ears. This is it! The song about ... the thing! But it turned out to be another song about some other thing. When Carsick Cars left the stage and waited in the wings for the encore fervor to mount, I found myself within earshot of the lead singer, and I had to fight the urge to put in a humble request: excuse me, sir, but would you please play the song about, you know ... the thing?
After much whistling and hooting, Carsick Cars returned to the stage. They dove into Zhong Nan Hai and I held my pack of cigs in the air and waved it around until one of Chongqing's many creepy-ass foreigners swiped it from me. I had to rassle him to get my cigs back. Then there was a familiar burst of feedback, a cymbal crash, a forlorn bass riff. Erin elbowed me in the gut. This was it - the song about, you know ... the thing. The Chinese hipster kids started jumping around, colliding with each other like so many atoms. I wondered whether they knew the song was about ... the thing, or if it was just music to them. The crowd jostled me around but I stood in one place, watching and listening. And I grew a bit misty-eyed. I thought about all the heavy books I'd read about China. I thought about China's thousands of years of circuitous history and the horrific struggle that had led however improbably to this moment in time. And though Carsick Cars were one band playing one song that was so lyrically ambiguous as to make you wonder whether it was really about ... the thing in the first place, still: this country has come a long way in a very short time. Zhe shi yi ge meiyou xiwang de guang chang they sang: this is a hopeless square. But they were not arrested for saying so. At least fifty Chinese hipster kids moshed to those words. So perhaps this may not be such a hopeless square after all.
But hopeless or not, I grew a bit homesick. Homesick for Omaha, where such balls, such nuts do not go unnoticed. Where dissent is as inescapable as Taco Bell. Carsick Cars, homesick homes. Almost a year into my Chinese adventure, dissent is what I miss most about America. Dissent, dissonance, diversity. Dissent, I suppose, is what makes America the ugliest, most beautiful nation on earth.
The lights came up. Another James Brown B-side. It was a short set - just under 45 minutes - and Carsick Cars didn't linger. They dissolved. Perhaps they hid out at the bar, or maybe they slipped quietly out the back door. A couple more Peace Corps kids came swaggering in. Hugs all around.
"Aw, shit - we missed it! How was the show?"
"Good," I said. "It was pretty good."
And it was. Yes, Carsick Cars were pretty good. No more, no less. They weren't Hendrix at Woodstock, or Costello on SNL, or Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall. China, perhaps, is not ready for that kind of dissent - and maybe it never will be. In the long run, the Chinese may not want anything to do with our Western modes of expression, our beautiful ugliness. It may be the case that China will never spawn a thriving indie rock scene any more than it will adopt English as its official language. Good for China, I suppose. Why should China do anything the Western way? We have our narrative and the Chinese have theirs. The Eastern and Western worlds may grow intertwined over time, or they may veer off in different directions completely. I have no say in the matter. Why should China westernize? Why should Radiohead play Creep? Why should Beck play Loser? I have learned over time not to pin China down to my expectations. I try to stifle the Free Bird impulse.
"I don't think this is the place," I said.
I searched my crummy cellphone dictionary for the word "nut" and showed the cabby a string of symbols that probably amounted to "testicle." He hawked a loogey and shook his head disgustedly. Then he rolled down the window to consult the roadside riffraff. They hobbled over to stare at me. And the riffraff, too, insisted that I had arrived at Nuts. I shrugged and paid the cabby, who charged me an additional riffraff consultation fee. Then he backhandedly complimented my Chinese while the roadside riffraff smacked their bamboo sticks against the pavement laughing at me. Welcome to China! the cabbby called out the window as he sped off into oncoming traffic.
I have learned over the years to do the exact opposite of what my sense of direction tells me to do, so the moment my sneakers hit the loogey-slick pavement, I turned away from the light and walked toward the darkness. I passed a China Construction Bank, an octopus tentacle vendor, a boarded-up porn shop, and then I came upon an oasis of black-shirted Chinese hipsters, smoking and drinking in the lamplight of an unmarked door. The door flew open and a James Brown B-side came bubbling out. This was no longer China. This, at last, was Nuts.
After I'd passed through customs and checked my backpack at the bar, I wandered right into the midst of a middle school sockhop: boys lined up along one wall, girls along the other. Straightening my collar, I coughed and looked around. Then I situated myself next to the foosball table and shuffled around until a pack of Chinese hipsters relegated me to the narrow slot between an overfull trashcan and a Samsung AC Unit.
Okay, I told myself, be cool. You are American. You are from Omaha. But a year had passed since my last indie rock show - St. Vincent at The Slowdown - and my pre-show shuffle was all out of whack. I found myself at a total loss for what to do during those tense moments before the stage lights came up. I gazed down at my Pumas and shuffled. I gazed up at the vacant stage and shuffled. I made eye contact with a spooky-looking foreigner. I gazed back down at my Pumas. Then I shuffled off to grab a beer.
"Shenme pijiu? Heineken, Hoegaarden, Duwel, Guinness - "
The bartendress made no mention of Tsingtao, or its more lethal counterpart, Snow. Clearly, I was not in Nanchong anymore. I ordered a Carlsberg.
"Oh, and do you sell cigarettes?"
"Zhong Nan Hai," she shrugged.
"What?"
"Zhong Nan Hai."
"Eh?"
She took a carton down from the shelf and held it up to my face.
"Zhooooong. Naaaaan," she said, underlining the characters as she read them. "Hai."
Aha! It clicked. Zhong Nan Hai: a brand of Chinese cigarettes, and incidentally, the name of the first track on the Carsick Cars' self-titled album. Of course! Why hadn't I noticed that before? I'd listened to Zhong Nan Hai hundreds of times and I'd smoked my share of Zhong Nan Hais in the meanwhile. Perhaps I'd even smoked a Zhong Nan Hai whilst listening to Zhong Nan Hai. And yet I'd never made the connection: Carsick Cars, the smartest rock band China has to offer, had written an ode to Zhong Nan Hais, the cheapest, most carcinogenic cigarette China has to offer.
I drifted back to my putrescent shuffling spot. I chatted with a Frenchman until his friends showed up. He bid me au revoir. Then a Dutchman chatted with me until my friends showed up. I bid him vaarwel. A heartwarming Peace Corps reunion ensued. Hugs all around.
"Nice haircut."
"Nice beard. How long you been here?"
"Not long," I shrugged. "Five minutes."
Vijay and I got ourselves mutually drunk on cheap tequila. The opening act - a riotgrrly punk trio named 24 Hours - took the stage. They launched into a jam called "Walrus" and the Chinese hipsters trickled down to the floor. The set did not last 24 hours, though it did include a twelve-minute rendition of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang." Then the lights came up. The Chinese hipsters reassumed their positions - boys on one side, girls on the other - while the motley foreigners pooled in the middle.
Another James Brown B-side. I shuffled and looked around. Where was everybody? In China, you'll be hard-pressed to find a square foot of space that isn't occupied by another human being, and yet here it was: Friday night, a rock show, and Nuts was more half-empty than half-full. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings: Carsick Cars, a band that has toured with Sonic Youth, has appeared in NME, has rubbed elbows with David Byrne - arguably the only Chinese rock band in China, performing for the first time in Chongqing, arguably the largest city in the world. And yet a mere 75 people had turned out for the show, many of them the sort of foreigners you wouldn't want to bump into in a dark alley. Or a well-lit one, for that matter.
So much the better, I figured. All the more permanent ear damage for me. I shuffled around, Carlsberg in hand, almost childishly stoked. In a sense, I'd been looking forward to the Carsick Cars show since the very moment I arrived in China. Not long after I'd adjusted to life in a country whose thesis is harmony through uniformity, I began to long for its antithesis. Diversity. Dissonance. Dissent. And though for eight months I went without knowing the name "Carsick Cars," I knew all along that something like Carsick Cars just had to exist in China, just as I knew that Chengdu, a city of twelve million, simply had to have a Mexican restaurant (if only one of them) ((and not a very good one, at that)).
Carsick Cars were something of an epiphany for me. I became an instant admirer. I listened to their eponymous album for months on end. Naturally, the next step was to see them live and in concert. But Carsick Cars had just embarked on a world tour and, last I'd checked, were playing a house party with David Byrne in Marfa, Texas - so I figured lowly Chongqing with its legions of loogey-hawking cab drivers couldn't be very high on their list. Until sometime last week, when a friend of mine handed me a crumpled-up flier and mumbled, "You heard of these guys?"
"Carsick Cars," I read. "24 Hours. Nuts."
I was going. That's all there was to it. I went to work. I smoked pack after pack of Zhong Nan Hais. Meanwhile, my expectations ballooned beyond all reasonable proportion. This was huge. Hendrix at Woodstock. Elvis Costello on Saturday Night Live. Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall. Carsick Cars at Nuts. I Febreezed my beard and hung my Radiohead t-shirt up to dry. I practiced my pre-show shuffle alone in my room. The week Febreezed by and at no point did it enter my mind that the long-awaited Carsick Cars show might not prove to be one of those epic rock 'n roll fuck-you gestures of lore. At no point did I consider that it might just turn out to be a pretty good indie rock show.
When Carsick Cars took the stage, nobody seemed to know who they were. While the band tuned up, the pit remained empty. Boys on one side, girls on the other. A line at the bar.
"Is that them?" I asked Vijay.
"Naw, I think there's a chick in the band," he said, "or at least a dude who looks like a chick."
"These dudes all look like dudes," I said, and checked the flier. "Maybe there's another opener. Maybe they're up nex - "
The lead singer leaned into the microphone: Women shi Carsick Cars. I shrugged. Vijay shrugged. And together we waltzed across the pit until we were right up against the stage.
In China, there is a code of rock 'n roll etiquette which dictates that rock stars must first politely greet their audience, then thank a litany of sponsors and salarymen, then chit-chat with the audience before introducing each and every song by name. In that respect, Carsick Cars were not very Chinese. They opened with feedback. They closed with feedback. One song screeched into the next. There was no stage banter, no smiles. Carsick Cars were at work. In a country that appreciates rock-as-novelty, makeup and leather jackets, girlish dudes with funky hair riffing on Pachelbel's Canon - here was a band of unattractive nerds whose palette was precisely sculpted noise. All and all, it was pretty good.
I am not a hit monger. I didn't clamor for "Creep" when I saw Radiohead at Wuhlheide, nor did I wet myself when Beck unexpectedly played "Loser" at the Columbiahalle in Berlin. I once saw a guy named Dan Wilson play at The Waiting Room in Omaha, and though his voice sounded awfully familiar, it wasn't until some buffoon shouted "Closing Time!" that I recognized him as the lead singer of Semisonic. And to his credit, Dan Wilson played fifteen songs nobody knew or cared about, then slipped quietly out the back door when no one was looking. So I respect musicians who do their own thing, and at shows, I try to stifle the Free Bird impulse. Nevertheless, I grew increasingly anxious as Carsick Cars plowed through one song after another - were they going to play it? You know, the song about ... the thing? With each opening riff, Erin and I glanced at each other and perked our ears. This is it! The song about ... the thing! But it turned out to be another song about some other thing. When Carsick Cars left the stage and waited in the wings for the encore fervor to mount, I found myself within earshot of the lead singer, and I had to fight the urge to put in a humble request: excuse me, sir, but would you please play the song about, you know ... the thing?
After much whistling and hooting, Carsick Cars returned to the stage. They dove into Zhong Nan Hai and I held my pack of cigs in the air and waved it around until one of Chongqing's many creepy-ass foreigners swiped it from me. I had to rassle him to get my cigs back. Then there was a familiar burst of feedback, a cymbal crash, a forlorn bass riff. Erin elbowed me in the gut. This was it - the song about, you know ... the thing. The Chinese hipster kids started jumping around, colliding with each other like so many atoms. I wondered whether they knew the song was about ... the thing, or if it was just music to them. The crowd jostled me around but I stood in one place, watching and listening. And I grew a bit misty-eyed. I thought about all the heavy books I'd read about China. I thought about China's thousands of years of circuitous history and the horrific struggle that had led however improbably to this moment in time. And though Carsick Cars were one band playing one song that was so lyrically ambiguous as to make you wonder whether it was really about ... the thing in the first place, still: this country has come a long way in a very short time. Zhe shi yi ge meiyou xiwang de guang chang they sang: this is a hopeless square. But they were not arrested for saying so. At least fifty Chinese hipster kids moshed to those words. So perhaps this may not be such a hopeless square after all.
But hopeless or not, I grew a bit homesick. Homesick for Omaha, where such balls, such nuts do not go unnoticed. Where dissent is as inescapable as Taco Bell. Carsick Cars, homesick homes. Almost a year into my Chinese adventure, dissent is what I miss most about America. Dissent, dissonance, diversity. Dissent, I suppose, is what makes America the ugliest, most beautiful nation on earth.
The lights came up. Another James Brown B-side. It was a short set - just under 45 minutes - and Carsick Cars didn't linger. They dissolved. Perhaps they hid out at the bar, or maybe they slipped quietly out the back door. A couple more Peace Corps kids came swaggering in. Hugs all around.
"Aw, shit - we missed it! How was the show?"
"Good," I said. "It was pretty good."
And it was. Yes, Carsick Cars were pretty good. No more, no less. They weren't Hendrix at Woodstock, or Costello on SNL, or Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall. China, perhaps, is not ready for that kind of dissent - and maybe it never will be. In the long run, the Chinese may not want anything to do with our Western modes of expression, our beautiful ugliness. It may be the case that China will never spawn a thriving indie rock scene any more than it will adopt English as its official language. Good for China, I suppose. Why should China do anything the Western way? We have our narrative and the Chinese have theirs. The Eastern and Western worlds may grow intertwined over time, or they may veer off in different directions completely. I have no say in the matter. Why should China westernize? Why should Radiohead play Creep? Why should Beck play Loser? I have learned over time not to pin China down to my expectations. I try to stifle the Free Bird impulse.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Death of a Neuron
I open the door and set my backpack on the floor. Then, grinning impishly at my Chinese tutor, I announce, "The Panda is arrived!"
"No!" she shouts.
And so it begins.
"'The Panda is arrived' is wrong," she says. "You should say 'The Panda has arrived!'"
I nod and sit down. My tutor slides today's offering across the table, an article about the perils of job seeking in China, and she tells me to read it. I squint and I squint, to no avail.
"Sorry, teacher," I say meekly, "but I've never seen any of these words in my life."
She laughs.
"What? You don't know the word 'job-hopping?'"
"Ah. No."
"You don't know the verb 'to establish?'"
"Negative."
"'To fall behind?'"
I shake my head. She huffs and shuffles through her papers. My ignorance has once again disrupted her lesson plan.
"Okay," she says. "Job-hopping is tiao cao. To establish is cheng li. To fall behind is luo huo. How do you say job-hopping?"
"Um. Ching ... chong?" I squeak.
"No! How do you say establish?"
"Chong ... ching?"
"No! How do you say fall behind?"
"Ah. Tiao cao."
"No, no, no!" She sighs. Clearly, I am a lost cause. "Okay, write tiao cao."
"But I don't know how."
She writes this on a scrap of paper:
I write this:
"No! That is wrong. Like this."
She writes.
"Like this?"
"No! Like this."
"Aha! Okay. So like this?"
"No, no, no!"
Over the course of an hour, I manage to stumble my way to the end of the article. Questions ensue.
"Why can't young people find jobs in China?" my Chinese tutor asks in English.
"Because there are too many young people and not enough jobs," I rattle off in Mandarin.
"No! That is wrong!" she shouts, again in English. "It's because there are too many college graduates and not enough jobs!"
I blink.
"Why do young people want to live in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai?" she asks.
"Young people want to live in big cities because their hometowns have ... " I reach for the word but can't find it. "Wait. I know this one. Their hometowns have ... have ... wait, I've got this. Their hometowns have -"
And though only a couple of seconds pass in realtime, in braintime those seconds are an eternity in which my brain cells are waging an epic struggle against my chronic forgetfulness. A single neuron unfurls her tendrils, they go waggling out into empty brainspace. Her sexy little axon snakes this way and that, beckoning one of her nearby suitors. A few nanoseconds later, she has wooed the handsome Chinese neuron who lives next door. He unfurls his tendrils, they go waggling out into empty brainspace. She reaches for the Chinese neuron and he reaches for her, and for an instant, it's the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: all those terminal buttons on the point of touching, almost, not quite, just one ... nanosecond ... more -
"To fall behind!" shouts my tutor. "Luo huo!"
I cringe. There is a burst of static, then my mind shuts down completely. Then a dull ache sets in.
"Ah. Luo huo," I murmur to myself. "Of course. Luo huo. Their hometowns have fallen behind."
The hardest part of learning Chinese in China is not the language. In fact, most foreigners are struck by the elegant simplicity of Mandarin: no conjugations, no plurals, no articles, no genders; he and she and it are all the same word; tense is implied by context; and if you happen to live in Sichuan, those ordinarily pesky tones are mostly irrelevant, because the locals speak a creole of dialect and the proper Mandarin they learn from watching so much damned television. Mandarin is surprisingly easy, and like most languages, it comes naturally after a while. What appears linguistically daunting at first becomes second nature after you've played with the language long enough. But Chinese is not a language one can tackle by oneself, so it is necessary to find a Chinese Virgil to shepherd you through the 36 Chambers of Mandarin Hell. And that, by far, is the hardest part of learning Chinese in China: finding someone who can lead you through those 36 chambers without roundhouse kicking you in the brain so many times that you are forced to leave the monastery altogether.
Thus far, my experience with the aforementioned Chinese tutor has been overwhelmingly positive. She works hard and she is technically well-qualified to teach a laowai like me: as an undergrad, she studied Teaching Mandarin as a Foreign Language. She bought me a bottle of rice vodka at the end of my first semester, bought me a cat-themed writing notebook for Christmas, lent me her copy of the Dao De Jing indefinitely. All things considered, she is one of the very few people in Nanchong who treats me like a human being. But she remains Chinese, and she teaches accordingly.
A couple months ago, I borrowed another book indefinitely - this time from the Peace Corps - named The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why. Despite flipping through its pages for close to an hour, I couldn't find the quote I was looking for, so this will have to do:
Western parents constantly require their children to do things on their own and ask them to make their own choices. ... The Asian parent makes the decision for the child on the assumption that the parent knows best what is good for the child.
If a young American child is struggling to unlock the front door, her father will watch her fumble with the keys until she figures it out herself. If an Asian child is caught in the same predicament, his mother will cut in and say, "No, like this," and unlock the door herself. This is the classic example everyone bats around in China, but I don't know enough about children to confirm or deny whether or not it is true. Nevertheless, it does point toward a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western education. In the West, we learn by trial and error and mostly error. In the East, teachers tell their students what to do, every step of the way. This persists through college and beyond. If I give my Chinese college students an activity to work on independently, chaos ensues. If I lecture at them for ninety minutes, the universe is in perfect order.
So I don't fault my tutor for her teaching methods. I can't fault her for being Chinese. All and all, I am ridiculously lucky to have found her. Many of my friends study with Christian fundamentalists, or Sichuanese college girls who can't even speak Mandarin. But eight months ago, on a rainy night in October, my phone rang for the 1.3 billionth time - yet another anonymous number - and I have no idea what inspired me to answer my tutor's call. But if I hadn't, I'd probably be studying Mandarin with the duckhead vendor on Feng Dun Road.
Thankful as I am for having met my tutor, the way in which she teaches me does more harm to my neurons than good. She practices her English most of the time and laughs at my Chinese. I never went to Catholic school, but my tutor raps me across the mental knuckles with a steel-tipped ruler every time I screw up. She assumes, like many Chinese, that the Chinese writing system is an alphabet, easily decipherable by even the most foreign of foreigners - when in reality, you can comprehend a new Chinese character no better than you can recognize the face of a complete stranger. That's Blake Johnston from Sandpoint, Idaho. Whaddaya mean you don't know him?
I am a man who earned a D minus in Handwriting on what was otherwise a valedictorian sixth grade report card. Even today I am inclined to write my letter E's backwards, and when I read my own journal entries from several months ago, I can barely make out what I was blathering about. So in those early days of Chinese class, I told my tutor that I did not want to study writing, that I wanted to focus on conversational Mandarin. In the weeks that followed, we plunged headlong into the depths of writing and vocabulary, and in the rare moments that I could summon the courage to speak, my words were swatted down with the steel-tipped rulers of No! and Wrong! And so it goes.
In the meantime, my Sichuanese has improved a great deal, mostly from the ten kuai taxi lessons I receive on the ride home from the Jack Bar. The other day, my cabby was a young dude in a silk suitcoat, and when I told him to take me to Xi Hua Shi Fan Da Xue Xin Qu, he shivered all over and giggled. Then he hooted.
"Ooh-wee! Your Chinese sounds so good!"
"Where, where?" I asked in my modest way.
"Everywhere," he said.
He asked me how much money I made every month. I told him. He shook his head and suggested that I look into a different line of work.
"Well," I said, "it's hard for college graduates to find jobs in America. I've been job-hopping for several years now. Our economy's really fallen behind."
"Ooh-wee!" the cabby hooted. "Job-hopping! Fall behind! Your Chinese is really fantastic!"
"Where, where?" I asked again, and blushed a bit.
The cabby drove and I rode. And meanwhile, in braintime, all my drunk neurons unfurled their tendrils, extended their axons and gave each other high-fives. Despite the best efforts of China and its brewing companies, my neurons yet live.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Happiness (With Chinese Characteristics)
If I had to choose a five-dollar SAT word to describe the people of Sichuan Province in the year 2010, the word would be "ebullient." I didn't even know what ebullient meant until I came to China. I mean, I could've defined the word for you, but I wouldn't have been able to conjure up a mental picture. But now the word "ebullient" is synonymous in my mind with the streets of Nanchong on a bleary Tuesday afternoon. Outside, it is cloudy, rainy, smoggy, almost Dickensian; the streets are crowded, filthy, and migraine-inducingly loud - but the Chinese are ebullient. Ebullient are the Chinese.
When in their natural habitat - the smoggy, filthy, overcrowded city - the Chinese do not seem to have any discernible mood other than delirious happiness. Imagine if you will: toddlers frolicking in the middle of a four-lane highway, bare butts exposed to the oncoming traffic; college kids chasing each other up and down the sidewalk, squealing, giggling, playing grab-ass; middle aged salarymen smoking, smoking, smoking and cursing with much zest and zeal; and the old timers just sitting and watching the merry madness unfold from a park bench, smiling and nodding like the universe is in perfect order.
The Chinese have moods, of course. But as a foreigner, it is unlikely that you will see many of them. Confucius say you gotta keep that shit bottled up, son. In private, the Chinese leave much to the imagination. In public, aside from the occasional haggling showdown or marital dispute, the Chinese are positively euphoric, as though there is nitrous oxide in the air - and considering what passes for oxygen in these parts, that isn't such a bad guess.
China is quite a change of pace from America, where a kind of paranoid irritation reigns supreme, and it is a world away from my Polish mining town, where everyone seemed at all times to be recovering from a mind-splitting hangover. China is a happy place. Not even Mexico comes anywhere near the sort of manic glee that slaps me in the face whenever I step outside my apartment. There in the driveway are oldsters hoisting up somebody else's grandson: hello, they whisper as I pass, hello! And the baby vomits on himself. And the oldsters laugh. And the baby shrieks. And the oldsters laugh. Baby vomit, and the universe is in perfect order. I will hereby declare, until I am proven otherwise, that China is the happiest country on Earth.
But it is a peculiar sort of happiness. It is Happiness With Chinese Characteristics. The Chinese are not happy in a wishy-washy existential sense, because we are all human beings and if we set aside our differences and work together, we can accomplish beautiful ... - no. The Chinese are happy because they are Chinese. Their happiness stems from the fact that finally, their China is making good on its potential. There is food. There is family. The family has food. That's a lot to be happy about when you think about it. And business: business is good these days. There is no capitalist ennui in China. Making money is still new and exciting, relatively untainted by rich man's guilt. So when business is good and you've got a well-fed family, what else is there to be but madly, deliriously happy?
Meanwhile, as a foreigner, you remain as moody as you have always been, perhaps even more so.
Monday: it rains for the sixth day in a row; you sink into a troth of melancholy.
Tuesday: you figure out how to order hot and sour soup; you're so happy that you weep hot and sour tears all the way home.
Wednesday: the school neglects to tell you about a schedule change; you miss a class and know that you have lost your students for the rest of the semester; when you get home, you punch the hell out of your pleather sofa.
Thursday: the old shopkeeper down the street waves at you and smiles broadly, warmly; this makes your day.
Friday: the water shuts off for 48 hours.
Saturday: somebody claps for you at the Jack Bar.
Sunday: you go to the bank and immediately the bank tellers start laughing at you; you tell them politely, in half-decent Sichuanese, that you would like to withdraw 200 kuai, and they laugh even harder; one of them grunts and slides a piece of paper your way and you write "200 kuai" on the piece of paper and grunt and slide it back; she shows the paper to her friend and together, they laugh.
What in the sandhill is this? you think. I am a customer! Nay, a client! I am a client with two bank accounts! I lend your bank $150, nay, $175 of my hard-earned Peace Corps blood money every month! Granted, I spend most of that money on Chinglish t-shirts and off-brand cola products, but still - your bank is borrowing my hard-earned volunteer blood money and you have the nerve to laugh at me! Why, I'll withdraw every last fen and take my business elsewhere, to the Agricultural Bank of China. Surely there they respect the common man, with his mold-encrusted facial hair and rumpled suitcoat! But no. They would laugh at you there, too. And who can blame them? They are happy and you are moody. And why shouldn't they be happy? It is you who have crashed their party, not the other way around.
So you play the part of the Good Christian and take your 200 kuai. You thank the bank tellers and they laugh at you. You shrug. And then you think of all the wonderful things you'll buy with that 200 kuai: Chinglish t-shirts and off-brand cola products and Panda cigarettes. And for a flicker of an instant, you can see why everyone is so damned happy here. To quote a rock band: here we're allowed everything all of the time. But then you worry whether prosperity might not get old after a while.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Interesting Times
Before I left England for China in 1936 a friend told me that there exists a Chinese curse — "May you live in interesting times". If so, our generation has certainly witnessed that curse's fulfilment [sic].
— Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War
I came to China in search of interesting times, and upon arrival, did my darndest to avoid them. I turned my apartment into a bomb shelter, walled myself in with secondhand Russian novels and truly apocalyptic caches of Nescafe. And ten months later, China remains China. I crack open the venetian blinds. There she is. China. Gray and metallic. Under construction. Growing more exotic and mystifying by the day. But I stubbornly remain myself. Four teaspoons of Nescafe, two chapters of Crime and Punishment. Every day I have the option of getting myself into all sorts of Chinese weirdness, but for the sake of sanity, I avoid it, opting instead to pursue my own weirdness in the comfort of my hermetically sealed bachelor pad.
But in China, I am never bored or uninspired or comfortable for very long. With eerie regularity, about once every three days or so, something or someone comes along and startles me right out of my hermetic slumber. China ambushes me on the walk home from work, gives me a wedgie and a purple nurple, steals my lunch money and runs cackling off into the distance. Or she takes me out for karaoke, serves me fresh watermelon and spiced radishes, gets me drunk on Crown Royal spritzers, and at the end of the night, when I insist on paying, she swats my hand away, reaches into her purse and makes it rain. These things happen to me. China does these things to me. I have no say in the matter. I can no more avoid China than MSG, can no more escape Chinese absurdity than I can breathe her air without inhaling coaldust, or drink her tap water without ingesting lead and arsenic and formaldehyde and all the rest. I came to China in search of interesting times, and despite my best efforts, I have found them.
When I came home from Mandarin class last night, a man in a bright orange China Mobile t-shirt was waiting for me in the stairwell. He shook my hand, then hugged me. I laughed uneasily. He followed me up the stairs and slid an ID card out from his billfold.
"My name is Mr. Wang!" he shouted. I turned the card over in my fingers. Indeed, Mr. Wang he was. He asked me where I lived. Upstairs, I murmured. I asked where he lived and he shouted, not here. In his left hand he held a plastic binder. His right hand kept pinching me. We arrived at the fourth floor and he hugged me again. Then he patted my gut.
"Don't ever drink," he shouted, hoisting up his belly for comparison, "or you'll get fat like me!"
My thoughts turned to the bottle of Duwel in my backpack, the first formaldehyde-free beer I'd managed to get my hands on since my arrival. I looked into Mr. Wang's eyes. A flicker of madness there. I could imagine him stabbing me in the stomach, swiftly retracting the dagger and darting down the stairs in one fluid motion. How cruel that would be. Me bleeding to death in the stairwell, a handful of neighbors watching me expire, and this beautiful eleven-ounce bottle of imported Duwel in my backpack that one of my college roommates would dump out over my grave after the funeral. Mr. Wang cackled. I smiled. Then he grew serious.
"No, don't ever get fat! We are men. And we like women. And women like us," he said, banging his fists together in the International Sign Language for "doing the wild thang." He cackled again and smacked me in the gut. The smile slowly faded from my face. I stared at Mr. Wang while he ranted at me. A puzzle was assembling itself in my brain. Mr. Wang looked familiar.
"So," he said, indicating my door, "let's go inside and talk."
"Actually, my apartment doesn't look so hot right now," I said. "It needs cleaning."
By then, one of my neighbors - a delightful chainsmoking Buddha of a man - was watching us from his doorway, smoking a Hongmei and grinning ever so slightly.
"Come on," Mr. Wang insisted. "Let me in!"
"It's very messy in there."
"I'm not scared!" he shouted, and laughed. "No, I'm not scared of anything, because of this!"
He reached down into his shirt and pulled out a small plastic crucifix. I nodded. And so one piece of the puzzle had fallen into place: I was being proselytized. But still, this Mr. Wang looked awfully familiar. Who was he? Where had I seen him before?
"Let's go! Let's go inside!"
"Wait," I said. "First of all, who are you?"
He yanked at my arm, pulled me towards the door. And that was the moment it all came together. Who is Keyser Sƶze? Who is Mr. Wang? Right then I realized that the man on my doorstep was the same maniac who, six months earlier, downtown, had yanked my arm as I was making an important cigarette transaction and tried to drag me out into the street. In the meantime, he had tracked me down, found out where I lived, had waited for me in the stairwell, and now he wanted in my apartment.
"Who are you?" I asked again.
"I'm Mr. Wang," he smiled. "I'm your friend!"
"You are not my friend," I said. "I don't know you."
He laughed. "I understand. I understand."
He turned and tried the door to my apartment.
"It's locked!" he shouted.
"Of course it's locked," I said. "It's my apartment."
"I just want to talk."
"Then we can talk here. What do you want?"
"I want to help you," he said.
"Help me with what?"
"Everything."
He laughed and smacked me in the gut.
"Look," I said. "I just got home from work. I'm very tired. How about we talk some other time."
"Let's talk now! Just for five minutes!"
"I am a busy man," I lied.
"I understand. I understand. In that case," he said, and opened his binder, "do you know where Ao Yan-Fei lives?"
I blinked. Ao Yan-Fei was the Chinese name of one of the Mennonites.
"No," I said. "I have no idea where she lives."
"You don't know?"
"No. Sorry. I have no idea."
"But you must know! You laowais are thick as thieves!"
"I'm new here," I said. "I don't know where anybody lives."
"But I want to help her!"
He smacked me in the gut. I looked him in the eyes.
"I don't think ... she needs ... your help."
"... what?"
"I said, I don't think ... she needs ... your help."
Mr. Wang laughed uncontrollably.
"Everybody needs my help," he said. "Look here."
He opened his binder. I peered over his shoulder as he shouted and thumped his index finger down on the handwritten pages. I squinted but couldn't make out any of the writing, just the words "In the year 1966 ... "
"Okay," I said. "I really have to go."
"Come with me to Ao Yan-Fei's apartment!"
"I'm not going to her apartment, and neither are you."
"What?"
I pointed towards my door.
"You see that? That's my apartment. That's where I live. That's my home," I said. "You are bothering me. I didn't invite you here. I don't know who you are. You're a stranger. You just showed up."
Mr. Wang frowned, then smiled. He raised his finger to speak, but I cut him off.
"And I know for a fact that my friend doesn't want some stranger showing up at her apartment," I said. "That's her home. That's where she lives. It's not polite to bother people at home. It's not very Chinese. You're not being very Chinese right now."
By then, in addition to the chainsmoking Buddha, a couple other neighbors had poked their heads out to observe the spectacle of the furious laowai shouting in bad Sichuanese, and under the gaze of so many Chinese eyes, Mr. Wang grew nervous.
"Just tell me where she lives," he said softly.
"I'm not going to tell you that."
"Okay," he said, "then I will find her myself."
He flung his arms open, hugged me, and swatted the hell out of my back. The bottle of Duwel clinked around in my backpack. Then Mr. Wang turned and scampered down the stairs two at a time. I watched him leave. Then I turned to my neighbor. He glanced at me, glanced at Mr. Wang, then glanced at me again. He spun his finger around his ear in the International Sign Language for "batshit crazy." Then he bid me a good night and shut the door.
After I'd triple-locked the door behind me, I sat down on the couch and cracked open my Duwel. Was it ever good. Then I put on an LCD Soundsystem album and turned it up so loud that the speakers threatened to jump off the table. And I sat there thinking about Mr. Wang. Was he schizophrenic, or just Christian? How did he find me? Why had he chosen me in the first place? Was I right in turning him away, or should I have caved and let him into my apartment, where the squalor of my bachelordom would have driven him away in seconds flat? No, he'd have said to himself, stifling a dry heave, this Pan Da cannot be saved.
In China, confrontations like these are mercifully few and far between. Most of the negative attention a laowai receives is strictly hit-and-run: a distant heckler, constant laughter, constant stares. It is omnipresent, but rarely is it personal. That said, when you finally find yourself mano a mano with someone who is actively conspiring to make your life less enjoyable, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible not to lose your cool. All that hit-and-run aggravation catches up with you all of a sudden. If you happen to have Irish blood pumping through your veins, you must stifle the impulse to punch, to kick, and to swear. You have to take a deep breath and politely suggest to the gentleman that he vacate your 800 square feet of rented property. Fight passive-aggression with aggressive pacifism. Gandhi and Martin Luther King and all the rest. Forgive these people, for they know not what they do. They know not what Irish rage they incur. Speak softly and -
A knock at the door. I sat there, frozen. Another knock. I stared into my beer. Knock, knock, knock. Slowly, silently, I got up and retreated to my study. I turned down my music, then switched it off altogether. Knock, knock, knock. I sat and waited. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour, and still the man knocked. I googled Chinese obscenities. "Fuck off" seemed a bit too strong for my purposes, as did "go to hell," but "leave me the hell alone" felt apropos. Knock, knock, knock. I waited. Knock, knock, knock. I tried to read. Knock, knock, knock. Then I got up, stormed across the living room, and peered through the peephole. There was Mr. Wang, knocking, smiling.
"Listen," I shouted, "I don't need your help."
"I want to help you!"
"This is my apartment. This is my home! You are bothering me!"
"I am trying to help you!"
"Leave me the hell alone!" I shouted. "Get lost!
He laughed. "I understand. I understand."
A moment passed. Then he knocked again.
"Go away," I said, "or I will call the police."
"You're going to call your friend? Ao Yan-Fei?"
"No. I am going to call the police."
"Oh. I understand. I understand."
A beat. I took a breath. I took a step towards my bedroom. He knocked again. So I kicked and pounded all hell out of the door. Mr. Wang let out a startled yelp, then he laughed. He shouted something. Then, finally, I heard his voice receding down the stairwell. I waited there with my ear pressed to the door for a minute or two. Silence. Then I gathered up my bottle of Duwel and my secondhand copy of Anna Karenina and curled up in bed. Oh, Anna, it's been so long. She's looking a bit worse for wear these days. I don't take care of my books. Her spine's all scoliotic, her pages stained with hot and sour soup, her foreword falling out one page at a time. But there she is, Anna Karenina, in all her promiscuous glory, sultry and seductive across the ages. And in these times of interesting times, I can't help but sink into Leo Tolstoy's interesting times. I can put Anna Karenina down. China, on the other hand, is inescapable. I crack open the venetian blinds. There she is. China. A security guard hawks a loogey. A nightbird cackles. Who knows what lurks around the bend?
Monday, May 10, 2010
Michel Gondry is Directing My Dreams
One of the fringe perks of living abroad that I didn't mention in my last post is this: you will have the weirdest dreams of your life. Dreams in which you rattle off complete nonsense in Polish, dreams in which you juggle German, Spanish, and Korean in a single sentence; dreams in which you find yourself in rural Sichuan and suburban Nebraska all at once; dreams in which your American college cronies make cameos in your Chinese classroom, and vice versa. Most of my dreams are pleasant and thought-provoking. But they are sometimes too intense for comfort, and at the far end of the intensity scale are what sleep scientists call hypnagogic hallucinations, or what I am inclined to refer to as waking dreams. You are awake, but dreaming. You are fully conscious but you can't move. The unreal is superimposed upon the real in such a way that you can tell the two worlds apart easily enough, but your nervous system cannot. So your body responds accordingly, and all you can do is sit and watch the madness unfold. Waking dreams tend to be, in a word, terrifying.
The Chinese word for a waking dream is 鬼å£čŗ« (gui ya shen), or "ghost pressing down on body." The Korean term translates into something like "being squashed by scissors." The Mexicans call it subirse el muerto or "dead person on top of you," and the Germanics chalk it all up to a succubus named Mahr, from whence the word "nightmare" is derived. Having spent much of my early twenties on Wikipedia, I was already well aware of all these facts before I experienced my first waking dream, so when it happened, I knew exactly what was going on. But that foreknowledge didn't make the experience any less horrifying.
I was living in South Korea at the time, in a dingy four-room apartment that was much too big for my liking. My bedroom window faced the east and had no curtains, so I was constantly waking up at 6 AM against my will. Late one night, insomnia-crazed and thoroughly fed up, I stuffed a bathtowel in the window frame and draped it down over the glass. Then, awfully pleased with my MacGyveresque ingenuity, I curled up in my usual fetal position and drifted off to sleep.
I woke up with the sun and rolled over in bed to glare at the ineffective towel - and there in its stead was a shimmering blue alien.
Now, I knew myself well enough even then to know that I wasn't schizophrenic, and I was fairly certain that the mushrooms I'd eaten for dinner were not of the magical sort. So I concluded that I was experiencing my first waking dream. But there is nothing more distressing to me than aliens - the cliche garden variety aliens, the hydrocephalic big-eyed ones - so even though I knew the whole thing was just a dream, the sweat was already streaming down my face and my heart began to gallop at a Secretariat pace. While I sat there motionless and gasping for breath, the alien hissed and started walking towards me. I can't tell you how scared I was. My body was frozen solid and there did indeed seem to be a German succubus sitting on my chest, a ghost pressing down on my body, Korean safety scissors squashing my head, a dead person on top of me. I couldn't move and I couldn't breathe. All I could muster was a feeble stream of profanities as the hideous blue thing started bitch slapping me across the face.
Wake up, I told myself, wake up, wake up, wake up. The alien was glowering over me, hissing and spitting, bitch slapping me across the face. I was so terrified that I very nearly became religious right there on the spot. But instead, I willed myself into wakefulness, slowly dragged my body upright, and finally, I was able to swing my arms loose of sleep. I lunged at the alien and caught it by the neck, at which point the alien transformed into an unwashed bathtowel. I held it in my hand for a moment, then threw it against the wall and flopped back into bed. I lay there murmuring the words "holy shit" until I was soothed enough to risk going back to sleep. Well, I said to myself, at least I'd gotten that out of the way. According to Wikipedia, most people only experience one waking dream per lifetime, so I passed out, relieved that I'd never have to deal with what sleep scientists call hypnogogic hallucinations ever again.
Until last night, when I awoke from what I could've sworn were twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep, only to glance at the clock and find that it was 3:30 AM. I sat up in bed but could not move my legs. Panic flared up in my brain. Not this again. Anything but this. I looked around me: there were my legs and there was my bed, and there was my east-facing window, and there was my wardrobe and the space heater in the corner and two weeks of underwear on the floor. Everything was in its right place. And yet nothing quite looked the way it should have. The film was grainy, the angles didn't line up, objects were flickering in and out of existence - and I was just beginning to wonder where I was when the bedroom door shot open and no fewer than twelve people came rushing in. Before I could get a word out, they rolled me over and ripped the sheets out from under me. Then they arranged themselves in a circle and stretched the bedsheet over my head. The circle rotated, the bedsheet began rippling: I laughed - they were playing the parachute game we used to play in third grade P.E. class. I sat under the parachute for a minute or two, watching it roll and ripple above me, and I laughed, and the people laughed, and for a moment I felt like a third grader again. Then the blanket deflated, the people flipped me over and made my bed for me, tucked me in, and hustled back out the door as quickly as they'd come. I sat there giggling for a while, giggling and waiting for whatever was to come next.
Suddenly, a trap door dropped from the ceiling and a clear plastic tube came snaking towards me. I gave it a tug and a showerhead flopped down and mechanically positioned itself in front of my mouth. I reached up and poked at it, then pushed it away from me. There came a hydraulic hiss from the bathroom and the showerhead switched on, blasting me in the face with ice cold Chinese tap water. I gurgled and laughed. The showerhead wiggled this way and that, and after a couple minutes of delirious giggling, I noticed that my bed was sopping wet and that the floor was flooded.
I thought immediately of my third floor neighbors. "Shit," I said, and got up to fetch a towel - and then everything evaporated, everything except my bedroom and the underwear strewn across the floor, the east-facing window and the wardrobe, and my bed, unmade as usual. I searched the ceiling for a trap door but found none. I ran out to the living room but my visitors had vanished. So I shrugged and climbed back into bed. Well, I said to my brain, that was fun. Let's do it again sometime. And I lay there for a few minutes marveling at the human brain, this three pound mass of pink stuff that can create worlds that are as real as reality. And as for reality: the brain creates that, too. But that same three pound mass drives us to drink and smoke cigarettes, goads us into cheating and telling lies, dupes us into working 47 years at that soul-sucking insurance company we hate with every fiber of our being. What a funny thing it is to be human. Aw, hell. Oh, well. I curled up in my usual fetal position and sank into a dream where I was seated comfortably in the backseat of a Nanchong taxi, and all's I had to do was tell the cabby how to get me home.
The Chinese word for a waking dream is 鬼å£čŗ« (gui ya shen), or "ghost pressing down on body." The Korean term translates into something like "being squashed by scissors." The Mexicans call it subirse el muerto or "dead person on top of you," and the Germanics chalk it all up to a succubus named Mahr, from whence the word "nightmare" is derived. Having spent much of my early twenties on Wikipedia, I was already well aware of all these facts before I experienced my first waking dream, so when it happened, I knew exactly what was going on. But that foreknowledge didn't make the experience any less horrifying.
I was living in South Korea at the time, in a dingy four-room apartment that was much too big for my liking. My bedroom window faced the east and had no curtains, so I was constantly waking up at 6 AM against my will. Late one night, insomnia-crazed and thoroughly fed up, I stuffed a bathtowel in the window frame and draped it down over the glass. Then, awfully pleased with my MacGyveresque ingenuity, I curled up in my usual fetal position and drifted off to sleep.
I woke up with the sun and rolled over in bed to glare at the ineffective towel - and there in its stead was a shimmering blue alien.
Now, I knew myself well enough even then to know that I wasn't schizophrenic, and I was fairly certain that the mushrooms I'd eaten for dinner were not of the magical sort. So I concluded that I was experiencing my first waking dream. But there is nothing more distressing to me than aliens - the cliche garden variety aliens, the hydrocephalic big-eyed ones - so even though I knew the whole thing was just a dream, the sweat was already streaming down my face and my heart began to gallop at a Secretariat pace. While I sat there motionless and gasping for breath, the alien hissed and started walking towards me. I can't tell you how scared I was. My body was frozen solid and there did indeed seem to be a German succubus sitting on my chest, a ghost pressing down on my body, Korean safety scissors squashing my head, a dead person on top of me. I couldn't move and I couldn't breathe. All I could muster was a feeble stream of profanities as the hideous blue thing started bitch slapping me across the face.
Wake up, I told myself, wake up, wake up, wake up. The alien was glowering over me, hissing and spitting, bitch slapping me across the face. I was so terrified that I very nearly became religious right there on the spot. But instead, I willed myself into wakefulness, slowly dragged my body upright, and finally, I was able to swing my arms loose of sleep. I lunged at the alien and caught it by the neck, at which point the alien transformed into an unwashed bathtowel. I held it in my hand for a moment, then threw it against the wall and flopped back into bed. I lay there murmuring the words "holy shit" until I was soothed enough to risk going back to sleep. Well, I said to myself, at least I'd gotten that out of the way. According to Wikipedia, most people only experience one waking dream per lifetime, so I passed out, relieved that I'd never have to deal with what sleep scientists call hypnogogic hallucinations ever again.
Until last night, when I awoke from what I could've sworn were twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep, only to glance at the clock and find that it was 3:30 AM. I sat up in bed but could not move my legs. Panic flared up in my brain. Not this again. Anything but this. I looked around me: there were my legs and there was my bed, and there was my east-facing window, and there was my wardrobe and the space heater in the corner and two weeks of underwear on the floor. Everything was in its right place. And yet nothing quite looked the way it should have. The film was grainy, the angles didn't line up, objects were flickering in and out of existence - and I was just beginning to wonder where I was when the bedroom door shot open and no fewer than twelve people came rushing in. Before I could get a word out, they rolled me over and ripped the sheets out from under me. Then they arranged themselves in a circle and stretched the bedsheet over my head. The circle rotated, the bedsheet began rippling: I laughed - they were playing the parachute game we used to play in third grade P.E. class. I sat under the parachute for a minute or two, watching it roll and ripple above me, and I laughed, and the people laughed, and for a moment I felt like a third grader again. Then the blanket deflated, the people flipped me over and made my bed for me, tucked me in, and hustled back out the door as quickly as they'd come. I sat there giggling for a while, giggling and waiting for whatever was to come next.
Suddenly, a trap door dropped from the ceiling and a clear plastic tube came snaking towards me. I gave it a tug and a showerhead flopped down and mechanically positioned itself in front of my mouth. I reached up and poked at it, then pushed it away from me. There came a hydraulic hiss from the bathroom and the showerhead switched on, blasting me in the face with ice cold Chinese tap water. I gurgled and laughed. The showerhead wiggled this way and that, and after a couple minutes of delirious giggling, I noticed that my bed was sopping wet and that the floor was flooded.
I thought immediately of my third floor neighbors. "Shit," I said, and got up to fetch a towel - and then everything evaporated, everything except my bedroom and the underwear strewn across the floor, the east-facing window and the wardrobe, and my bed, unmade as usual. I searched the ceiling for a trap door but found none. I ran out to the living room but my visitors had vanished. So I shrugged and climbed back into bed. Well, I said to my brain, that was fun. Let's do it again sometime. And I lay there for a few minutes marveling at the human brain, this three pound mass of pink stuff that can create worlds that are as real as reality. And as for reality: the brain creates that, too. But that same three pound mass drives us to drink and smoke cigarettes, goads us into cheating and telling lies, dupes us into working 47 years at that soul-sucking insurance company we hate with every fiber of our being. What a funny thing it is to be human. Aw, hell. Oh, well. I curled up in my usual fetal position and sank into a dream where I was seated comfortably in the backseat of a Nanchong taxi, and all's I had to do was tell the cabby how to get me home.
Listless Mistress
Just before I came to China, I wrote about wanderlove. I coined the pun to describe the long-term contentment with living abroad that sets in after wanderlust has faded, after you've grown jaded to all manner of foreign novelties - squat toilets, babies crapping in the street, movie theaters that sell beer, the Royale With Cheese. Wanderlust becomes wanderlove at the point when you cease to view those cultural quirks as novelties, but as inescapable facts of life.
Love is a difficult thing, and so is wanderlove. It's all roses for the first three months, when you're still flying along on the wings of wanderlust. Babies crap at your feet, and you laugh. You slip and tumble headlong into the squat toilet, and you laugh. You order a Royale With Cheese and they give you six of the goddamn things, and you laugh. Then you hit month four and all those shenanigans suddenly cease to be amusing. You wish you didn't have to sidestep so much human feces on your walk to work, and you wish that you could sit and read Bakunin on the crapper, and you wish that you could just get a Quarter Pounder With Cheese fer chrissakes. You spend the next three months reviling everything about the culture that surrounds you, too proud for homesickness but thoroughly pissed off that nobody conforms to your definition of normalcy. So you sulk and delve into your Russian novel collection, because therein lies normalcy, right?
After six months, you peek out from under your Dostoevskian shell and find that life is once again livable. You make friends. You establish connections. You flourish, sort of. And so begins wanderlove, the understanding that you are not separate from the foreigners around you - however separately they may regard you as a foreigner - but that you are a human being, and that they are human beings, and that you all must live with each other somehow and so on and soforth. Which sounds like a happy ending, but it really isn't. It is only the beginning of a long and often tedious marriage built on a foundation of routine, compromises, petty squabbles and honey-do chores.
It's like courting the ravishing Anna Karenina and, after six painstaking months, finally luring her away from that robot husband of hers – only to watch her grow obese and leathery and dull before your very eyes. After six months abroad, you start to wonder where the spark went. We used to have such great chemistry, me and China Karenina, but nowadays I'm lucky if she even puts out. She refers to the sex act as our "duty to the Party." And now she wants kids. Kids? To be perfectly honest, there are days when I get home from work, crack open the Rand McNally World Atlas and ogle the hell out of Kyrgyzstan - her exotic netherregions, her vague southern border, that skimpy little green bikini that leaves little of her topography to the imagination.
This is my roundabout way of saying that I am fending off another bout of writer's block. China remains as quirky as ever, but at the moment, I don't find her all that alluring. I tried attacking my writer's block with gross amounts of Nescafe, with formaldehyde beer, with Panda cigarettes. I experimented with cleaning my apartment, then I experimented with trashing the place. Perhaps, I thought, my diet had something to do with it. I ate nothing but cabbage for a week, then I devoured four Royales With Cheese in rapid succession. Then I started appearing at strange new restaurants and pointing at random menu items whose Chinese characters looked menacing, to say the least. I discovered spicy pig intestine soup that way, but the experiment did little to clear my writer's block - or my colon, for that matter.
I'm not sure what the problem is. There is no shortage of material to write about. I still haven't written about my trip to Yunnan, or the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom, or the World's Largest Transformer – nor have I written about the Zebra Music Festival, or the two-hour lecture on Western History and Culture that I gave the other night, or the rural middle school I taught at a couple weeks ago in exchange for a pack of Panda cigarettes, or the Mrs. Robinson of China, who first tried to set me up with her daughter, then literally threw herself at me in the darkness of a karaoke room, asking me in a baijiu-breathed whisper whether I wanted "a Chinese mama." And meanwhile, the babies continue to crap at my feet, the cabbies continue to scare the bejeezus out of me, and my students continue to baffle me. So there is no shortage of material. But what I lack at the moment is the ability to see any of that material as new, or amusing, or worth writing about.
Which leads me back to wanderlove. Who is this pimply old China Karenina in my bed? This is not my beautiful wife! This is not my beautiful house! And the days go by, same as it ever was. You watch her playing mahjongg with her oldster friends and wonder how she could possibly find that lousy game so damned fascinating. For four hours she plays mahjongg, then she comes home and nags you to shave, to get a haircut, to tie your shoes. She asks if you can use chopsticks. Look, honey, for the 1.3 billionth time ... She tells you your classes are too easy, then she tells you they're too hard. She flips through the Russian novel you're reading and shouts, "I can't understand a word of it!" On the street, she picks up and coddles somebody else's baby, then holds it over a sewer drain to take a crap. Then on the walk home all she talks about is babies this, babies that, oh Panda, shouldn't we perform our duty to the Party and make one of our very own? And meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan, that saucy little thing, beckons you from page K-72 of the 2006 Rand McNally World Atlas.
But something about China keeps you around. She is nothing if not consistent. She's loyal, hardworking. She keeps you well fed. She isn't much for conversation, but then, neither are you. Every now and again, she does something charming to remind you of the good old days, when you were young together, and the spark flickers anew, if only for a minute or two. Then, one day, you hear through a mutual friend that Kyrgyzstan has fallen off the democratic wagon and checked into rehab again. You breathe a sigh of relief. Dodged a bullet, there. Maybe, you begin to think, you don't have it so bad after all. You watch China slaving away in the kitchen. My God, you think, the size of that rump! No, China might not be much to look at anymore - the old grey mare, as they say, just ain't what she used to be. She's stubborn, impolite, surprisingly filthy. She's sensitive to a fault and moody as hell. She's jealous of all your past loves: Germany, Poland, Mexico, and especially South Korea, that soju-drinking hussy. She's a sucker for gossip, she pries into your personal affairs, and she can't carry a tune. All and all, she's a totalitarian woman. But can she ever cook ...
Love is a difficult thing, and so is wanderlove. It's all roses for the first three months, when you're still flying along on the wings of wanderlust. Babies crap at your feet, and you laugh. You slip and tumble headlong into the squat toilet, and you laugh. You order a Royale With Cheese and they give you six of the goddamn things, and you laugh. Then you hit month four and all those shenanigans suddenly cease to be amusing. You wish you didn't have to sidestep so much human feces on your walk to work, and you wish that you could sit and read Bakunin on the crapper, and you wish that you could just get a Quarter Pounder With Cheese fer chrissakes. You spend the next three months reviling everything about the culture that surrounds you, too proud for homesickness but thoroughly pissed off that nobody conforms to your definition of normalcy. So you sulk and delve into your Russian novel collection, because therein lies normalcy, right?
After six months, you peek out from under your Dostoevskian shell and find that life is once again livable. You make friends. You establish connections. You flourish, sort of. And so begins wanderlove, the understanding that you are not separate from the foreigners around you - however separately they may regard you as a foreigner - but that you are a human being, and that they are human beings, and that you all must live with each other somehow and so on and soforth. Which sounds like a happy ending, but it really isn't. It is only the beginning of a long and often tedious marriage built on a foundation of routine, compromises, petty squabbles and honey-do chores.
It's like courting the ravishing Anna Karenina and, after six painstaking months, finally luring her away from that robot husband of hers – only to watch her grow obese and leathery and dull before your very eyes. After six months abroad, you start to wonder where the spark went. We used to have such great chemistry, me and China Karenina, but nowadays I'm lucky if she even puts out. She refers to the sex act as our "duty to the Party." And now she wants kids. Kids? To be perfectly honest, there are days when I get home from work, crack open the Rand McNally World Atlas and ogle the hell out of Kyrgyzstan - her exotic netherregions, her vague southern border, that skimpy little green bikini that leaves little of her topography to the imagination.
This is my roundabout way of saying that I am fending off another bout of writer's block. China remains as quirky as ever, but at the moment, I don't find her all that alluring. I tried attacking my writer's block with gross amounts of Nescafe, with formaldehyde beer, with Panda cigarettes. I experimented with cleaning my apartment, then I experimented with trashing the place. Perhaps, I thought, my diet had something to do with it. I ate nothing but cabbage for a week, then I devoured four Royales With Cheese in rapid succession. Then I started appearing at strange new restaurants and pointing at random menu items whose Chinese characters looked menacing, to say the least. I discovered spicy pig intestine soup that way, but the experiment did little to clear my writer's block - or my colon, for that matter.
I'm not sure what the problem is. There is no shortage of material to write about. I still haven't written about my trip to Yunnan, or the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom, or the World's Largest Transformer – nor have I written about the Zebra Music Festival, or the two-hour lecture on Western History and Culture that I gave the other night, or the rural middle school I taught at a couple weeks ago in exchange for a pack of Panda cigarettes, or the Mrs. Robinson of China, who first tried to set me up with her daughter, then literally threw herself at me in the darkness of a karaoke room, asking me in a baijiu-breathed whisper whether I wanted "a Chinese mama." And meanwhile, the babies continue to crap at my feet, the cabbies continue to scare the bejeezus out of me, and my students continue to baffle me. So there is no shortage of material. But what I lack at the moment is the ability to see any of that material as new, or amusing, or worth writing about.
Which leads me back to wanderlove. Who is this pimply old China Karenina in my bed? This is not my beautiful wife! This is not my beautiful house! And the days go by, same as it ever was. You watch her playing mahjongg with her oldster friends and wonder how she could possibly find that lousy game so damned fascinating. For four hours she plays mahjongg, then she comes home and nags you to shave, to get a haircut, to tie your shoes. She asks if you can use chopsticks. Look, honey, for the 1.3 billionth time ... She tells you your classes are too easy, then she tells you they're too hard. She flips through the Russian novel you're reading and shouts, "I can't understand a word of it!" On the street, she picks up and coddles somebody else's baby, then holds it over a sewer drain to take a crap. Then on the walk home all she talks about is babies this, babies that, oh Panda, shouldn't we perform our duty to the Party and make one of our very own? And meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan, that saucy little thing, beckons you from page K-72 of the 2006 Rand McNally World Atlas.
But something about China keeps you around. She is nothing if not consistent. She's loyal, hardworking. She keeps you well fed. She isn't much for conversation, but then, neither are you. Every now and again, she does something charming to remind you of the good old days, when you were young together, and the spark flickers anew, if only for a minute or two. Then, one day, you hear through a mutual friend that Kyrgyzstan has fallen off the democratic wagon and checked into rehab again. You breathe a sigh of relief. Dodged a bullet, there. Maybe, you begin to think, you don't have it so bad after all. You watch China slaving away in the kitchen. My God, you think, the size of that rump! No, China might not be much to look at anymore - the old grey mare, as they say, just ain't what she used to be. She's stubborn, impolite, surprisingly filthy. She's sensitive to a fault and moody as hell. She's jealous of all your past loves: Germany, Poland, Mexico, and especially South Korea, that soju-drinking hussy. She's a sucker for gossip, she pries into your personal affairs, and she can't carry a tune. All and all, she's a totalitarian woman. But can she ever cook ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)